Outcome Independence: It’s Not Just For Breakfast Anymore.

“I’m not a comic book villain.  Do you think I’d explain my masterstroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome?  I triggered it 35 minutes ago.” – Watchmen

A photon walks into a hotel.  The bellman asks, “Can I help you with your bags?”  The photon says, “No, I’m travelling light.”

One concept that I love is “outcome independence”.  I’d define it this way – you go out and do your best, and whatever happens, happens.

When put that simply, it sounds like it would be mad folly to operate in any other way.  But all too often I find that I slip into a different mode:  trying to win.  These two aren’t the same, and in many cases, they’re not even compatible.

I’ll go with an example I’ve probably trotted out before:  asking a girl out on a date.

Someone called me lazy today.  I almost replied.

When I was a freshman in high school, I saw a girl that I thought was smart and cute.  I called her up because I knew her number because phone books were a thing, and said, “Hey, I was wondering if you’d like to go see a movie?”

Her response was fairly straightforward:  “No, I’m busy that night.”

Please note that I never specified which night or even what movie I was planning on taking her to.  Nope.  I realized that her answer wasn’t just a no, it was a “No, and don’t ever bother me again.”

So, I didn’t – I don’t think I said another sentence to that girl for the next four years.  I wasn’t butthurt, we just only had one or two classes together, and the only thing we had in common were my eyes and her torso.

Teenage John’s operating system diagram.  All details included.

However, I still recall with some epicaricacy the last time I saw her as she emerged, crying, from the guidance counselor’s office.  Seems like someone had beaten her overall GPA and that speech she’d been planning to give at graduation would have to come from . . . me.

If only she had distracted me at a movie.  Oh, well.

Although I did get shot down in flames on that phone call, it really didn’t bother me.  Freshman me understood what older me sometimes forgets:  give it your best shot, and what happens, happens.  In many cases, you can do the impossible.

I had a boss who taught me that.  On a regular basis, he’d ask me to do something that either in a business or technical sense exceeded what I thought could be done.  “Wilder, go and figure out how we can do IMPOSSIBLE TASK A.”

Freed from the idea of failure, since I already thought it was impossible, I went out and, 9 times out of 10, actually did things I would have thought were ludicrous goals.  Yes, I wanted to win, but when I was put in an impossible place that actually simplified the task at hand because I no longer feared failing.

I always eat sausage on February 2nd, after all, it’s ground hog day.

This boss regularly did that, and 9 out of 10 times, he’d succeed.  Now, one of the failures got him fired, but his severance package was $2,000,000, (several decades ago) so I didn’t spend a lot of time crying for him.

Outcome independence worked pretty well for him, too.

If I were to look at this from the perspective of how (and why!) I need to keep outcome independence in my mind, I’d toss these reasons out:

  1. I’m not afraid of failure. Failure happens, but if I never fail, that means I’m always operating within my limits.  Only when I try to exceed them do I get better.  Never failing means never improving.
  2. It focuses me on the things I can truly control. I really believe I’m a very, very lucky guy, but that luck isn’t something that I can impact, despite the several superstitious things that I do.
  3. Focusing on success only in some cases requires external validation of that success. I know when I’ve done a good job, but if I have to wait for others to acknowledge it, well, that’s nearly the same as depending on luck.
  4. Ever see a guy win a gold medal, and then just fall apart? And a guy who lost be content he was just there?  Either the winner was exhausted or he no longer had a goal.  Regardless, focusing only on the outcome can lead to a road where victory becomes defeat.

It was easy to write those four points – because I’ve found myself heading down each of those paths at various points in my life.  Now that I’m a bit more seasoned, when I find myself getting wrapped up in the outcome, I step back and try to get rid of the mindset that has crept back up on me.

I bought some Himalayan salt that the label said was over 250 million years old.  The label says it expires in June of 2025.

Partially, I have to admit defeat over the things I simply cannot control.  I have to revert to the “whatever happens, happens” mindset.  If I lose, what can I change?  If I lose, does that make me a loser?  No.  I lost so I have learned.  Now, if it was something stupid like playing chicken with a Hellfire® missile, well, I might only have milliseconds to contemplate my learnings, but like Thucydides (say that six times fast) said, luck favors the daring.

Maybe that’s why I was so lucky?  Or maybe I was too stupid to know when to quit.

Ultimately, I have to be okay with being me.  And I have to be okay playing the game where the stakes are high enough that winning is important, but keeping it about being the best I can be, and understanding that sometimes I’ll lose.

He also said I needed a federal aid.  Or maybe it was a utility grade.  Had trouble hearing him.

When I lose, though, I lose knowing I’ve given it everything I’ve got, and go down fighting.

And the next day?  Learn, and start again.

I know one outcome:  nobody gets out alive.  Guess I might as well make the best use of the heartbeats I have left.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

25 thoughts on “Outcome Independence: It’s Not Just For Breakfast Anymore.”

  2. I wonder if Erwin Schrodinger was inspired to develop quantum mechanics based on past experiences with woman? Where else could he get the idea that something could be both right and wrong at the same time?

      1. Where there is that whole thing with Schrodinger’s “cat” where you don’t know is if it is alive or dead until you open the box. I’m guessing he intended some sexual undertones in that one….

        1. The Schrodinger Equation was developed exactly 100 years ago in 1925, a discovery equal to Hubble’s announcement of the expanding universe. What a yeat. Schrodinger originally came up with his Cat in 1935 as a ridiculous objection on why the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics / his equation couldn’t possibly be correct. The adherents of this version of QM took over the Cat as a badge of honor and said yep, This Is The Way. It was basically a philosophical argument until John Bell showed in the 1960s how to run an experiment to choose between the two factions. Alaine Aspect did such an experiment, the Cat won, and AA won the 2022 Nobel Prize for his work.

          It’s scientific insanity. As Feynman said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.

          1. Bell’s Inequality is a strawman argument. It proves nothing except sawtooth waves are not identical to sine waves.

          2. It is amazing what scientific developments took place at the first half of the 20th century. I remember seeing an interview with a science historian who said that major scientific breakthroughs peaked in the early 1900’s and pretty much ground to a halt by the 70’s.

            Yeah, there have been major increases in computer speed since then but these are all just incremental engineering improvements, as opposed to an actual scientific breakthrough.

            Heck, I’m still waiting on the flying car that they promised me.

          4. @McChuck – it’s just a little more complicated that that. 🙂 I have been trying to wrap my head around QM since sitting thru a year of incomprehensible undergrad lectures inthe mid-70s, none of which mentioned Bell. From there in the 80s I found Zukav’s book Dancing Wu Li Masters and Merman’s classic 1985 Physics Today article Is The Moon There When Nobody Looks ( both worth googling) to be good starting points for “what does it all mean”. It’s more than sine and square waves, it’s quite the rabbit hole. Together Bell and Aspect have proven that reality is non local and not predetermined. How this can be is beyond human experience and may be beyond human understanding, but it is true. The impassioned insight from a 1925 tryst has led to a 2022 Nobel Prize. Where we go from here with this in the next hundred years is a wide open question.

            https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?author=I.+Dhand&author=A.+D%27Souza&author=V.+Narasimhachar&author=N.+Sinclair&author=S.+Wein&author=P.+Zarkeshian+&publication_year=2018&title=Understanding+quantum+physics+through+simple+experiments%3A+from+wave-particle+duality+to+Bell%27s+theorem&journal=arXiv+%5BPreprint%5D.

          5. @Ricky – No, it’s not more complicated than that. I’ve studied this for quite a while. I’ve read the paper (it’s only, what, 6 pages long?), and followed the news. The Nobel Prize was for proving that sine waves are sine waves, and that randomized trials of sine waves still show they are sine waves. Well, duh.

            Bell’s theorem is garbage. I’m not the first to notice this. Oddly enough, at least a dozen physicists who pointed out that the emperor has no clothes got fired and silenced. And that was back in the 1960’s and 70’s.

  3. Focusing on what you can control instead of what you cannot is great life advice. Not following that advice is what got me into blogging.

    1. With me, The Mrs. challenged me to up my game – make my writing better. Not to be complacent. And I also tilt at windmills.

  5. “Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it.”
    ― Theodore Roosevelt

  7. No! Wrong wrong wrong, John Wilder!
    The proper response to any setback is anger and resentment.

    If I fail at something it’s because of centuries of systemic racism. My lack of intellect, lack of impulse control, lack of work ethic, plus general incompetence had nothing to do with it. Racism is to blame. Obviously.

    If someone doesn’t like me it’s because of anti-Sinotism. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with my actions. (Or the actions of other Chinese — over whose crappy behavior I have no control — but the human brain is first and foremost a pattern-recognition machine.)

  8. “…I’m busy that night.” Ranks right up there with “Sorry, I’m washing my hair that night.”

    Heard that a lot in HS.

    1. It was okay. Nobody wants to date a freshman, including freshmen. It wasn’t long however until I was a sophomore . . . .

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