The Probability Theory Behind "Do Your Best and Leave the Rest to Heaven"

Why is Jack Ma so rich?

Go looking for all those inspirational chicken-soup stories and you’ll find plenty of analysis, usually starting from Ma’s childhood, as if he were destined to be a business titan.

But if you analyze China’s historical trajectory over the past thirty-plus years, the appearance of a figure like Jack Ma was almost inevitable. China has the world’s largest market, and add to that the wave of the information revolution: the emergence of new-economy billionaires was inevitable. Hence: the wind rises and the pig takes flight.

So the question becomes: why is this person Jack Ma? Seen historically, it’s just a random event — if not Ma Yun, then Li Yun or Zhang Yun. All the chicken-soup stories are hindsight: they link every factor that can possibly be linked to the final success, because the soup needs to give the reader a momentary illusion — I can succeed too, as long as I do what the book says.

On the matter of success, I think the ancients said it all: do your best and leave the rest to heaven. I’d like to read it again through probability.

A person’s success is always a probabilistic event. There are too many uncontrollable factors in fate; no one can guarantee control over their own destiny. Send Jack Ma back in time for another run in a parallel universe, and perhaps one tiny change would be enough to keep him out of the ranks of the richest. But even so, I believe he would still live a fuller life than most people, because he did after all think harder than most, and acted on his thinking.

Success is a probabilistic event, and hard work can raise that probability — sustained hard work especially. Something with a 50% success rate, tried twice, raises the probability of success to 75%, because life is not gambling: often seizing one opportunity is enough to launch you into the sky. Take the Vietnamese guy who made a small fortune with Flappy Bird — before that he’d made a dozen-odd apps and not one of them took off. He merely, through his own persistence, waited for one success.

The truly useful principles may not excite you directly when you hear them. “Do your best and leave the rest to heaven” is that kind of principle: it asks you to exert your utmost, yet not to harbor excessive expectations of success. How many of the restless can actually do that?

If I work hard and still might not succeed, why should I work hard at all?

Hard work raises the probability of success. Even a pie falling from the sky requires you to go outside to pick it up.

What if I keep working hard and never succeed?

First, success should be seen as a return on effort. The return after effort can be large or small; it is a probabilistic event. So you should pay more attention to growth — in essence there is no clear boundary between success and failure. Take a step back: even if you are never “successful,” a person who can strive for a lifetime has not lived this life in vain, and has already come close to the meaning of life. That should be regarded as a gift from heaven.