Every goal that you are pursuing, consultant Kyle Austin Young notes, has two hidden but crucial numbers attached to it: A probability of success and a probability of failure. That means to be successful with your New Year’s resolutions or any other goals you come up with in 2026, you need to figure out the odds and do your best to make them work for you.
One way is to simply give yourself more opportunities to be successful, even if the odds aren’t otherwise with you. He points in his book Success is a Numbers Game to an entrepreneur who finding out that 90 per cent of new businesses failed turned that around – 10 per cent succeed – and started many different businesses until he made it happen. That seems to apply to Nobel Prize laureates, who publish twice as many scientific papers as other highly distinguished researchers.
He also notes that Mozart composed more than 600 pieces of music. Beethoven composed even more – 700. Thomas Edison had more than 1,000 patents. And, switching to ice cream, Ben & Jerry’s has more than 300 discontinued lines of ice cream.
That offers you three paths to achieve your goal:
- Chase goals where the odds are always on your side. The problem with this approach is that the goals you are most likely to achieve may not be the ones you are most excited to achieve.
- Ignore the odds and chase unlikely goals, hoping you get lucky. That’s what we unwittingly do mostly, and sometimes it works out. But he says it’s usually a losing strategy for complex, challenging goals.
- Pursue unlikely goals through multiple attempts, improving your odds. But sometimes that is impractical; a high school student, for example, can’t enroll in four universities. And sometimes the odds are so bad that the approach mathematically would not be expected to work.
That leads him to recommend what he calls probability hacking: Make the chances of success greater and the chances of failure smaller, rewriting your probability outcome.
In doing so, keep in mind chasing goals involves various steps:
- Your odds of accomplishing a goal can be understood as the odds of each thing that must happen in order for you to succeed, multiplied together. If you want to start a band with a drummer, lead guitarist and bass player, if the chances of getting a talented guitar player is 90 per cent, bass player 70 per cent and drummer 60 per cent, your odds of success are 37.8 per cent (you can do the math).
- The odds of achieving a goal will never be higher than the odds of your most improbable prerequisite step. So give that one special attention.
- All other things being equal, the more steps that have to go right for you to succeed, the lower your odds of success.
- Every time you complete a required step in achieving your goal, your odds of success will go up. When the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Seattle Mariners in the American League Championship Series, their odds of winning the World Series went up, as it did when they won the first game in the best of seven series.
Thinking of the sequence of steps needed to accomplish your goal allows you to create a diagram of the journey to success. Then ask yourself if there’s an easier path to your goal. When job hunting, a strong referral can help, so you want to seek that.
It’s important to determine which steps are the ones with the highest probability of a bad outcome and then how you can turn the odds in your favour. If you can’t improve your odds, that indicates you are chasing a goal where you have little control.
Keep his main point top of mind as you do this: Every goal you are pursuing has two hidden numbers attached to it. You want to make the probability of success higher and probability of missing out lower. Happy New Year!
Quick hits
- Executive coach Dan Rockwell believes anger is a check engine light. Frustration and anger is a signal that something is wrong. Figure out what it is telling you about yourself, what values feel violated, what outcome is being short-circuited and how you can improve the situation rather than making it worse through a tirade.
- Author James Clear lists these three keys to improvement: Do you start quickly? Do you learn from your mistakes quickly? Do you stay in the game and keep trying?”
- Author Mark Manson warns there are graveyards full of people who, afraid of being laughed at constantly, told themselves: Not now – one day in future.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.