An argument broke out on my timeline the other day. Somebody posted research on outcomes for kids from two-parent homes, and the replies filled up with the same sentence, over and over: “I was raised by a single mother, and I turned out fine.”
Hundreds of people, all making the same move. And the wild part is, every one of them was right. They did turn out fine. They also proved absolutely nothing about the research, because they were answering a question no one asked.
That thread is one of the best examples of what of one of the most expensive thinking errors a person can commit: confusing what’s possible with what’s probable.
I think about this a lot since forecasting and probability are a part of what I do every day. Within digital marketing, we are tasked with planning daily, monthly, and annual budgets, and the fastest way to torch a budget is to plan around a keyword, audience, or tactic that is not likely to perform at the same rate in the future. I can base my forecasts on what I would like to happen or what would make a great story; I have to plan around what is most probable, not what is possible. An incorrect analysis can lose millions. The same error that empties an ad account empties lives. It just moves slower.
## Two different questions
Here’s the sorting system, because everything downstream depends on it.
Possibility is a yes-or-no question. Can a quarterback under six feet win a Super Bowl? Yes. Russell Wilson is listed at 5’11” and won Super Bowl XLVIII. Question closed.
Probability is a rate. Out of every hundred quarterbacks under 6’0” who are drafted into the league, how many will win a Super Bowl? Almost none. Most starting NFL quarterbacks are 6’2″ or taller, and it’s not prejudice. In laymen’s terms, you have to see over a wall of 300-pound men to throw the ball. Wilson is real, Drew Brees is real, both won a Super Bowl. But both are anomalies in the data, outliers, highly improbable.
The mistake most people make is answering the probability question with possibility data. Someone points at the one guy who made it and says “see, it can be done,” like a single example settles anything. It settles the yes-or-no question. However, It tells you nothing about the odds, changes, or probability of achieving a certain outcome. I know this is hard to grasp; even Einstein had trouble accepting the probability of quantum superposition. He hated it because he felt like we should know where the particle is rather than only having a probability of where it is.
Humans naturally HATE probability because we only see outcomes. If something has a 30% chance of happening and it happens, to everyone involved, that “happening” represents 100% of what happened. We can’t “see” the other possible outcomes. Think about it. If one winning lottery ticket proved lotteries were a good investment, we’d all be rich.
Why your brain does this
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s factory wiring, and three habits do most of the damage.
Survivorship bias is the first. You only ever hear from the winners. The 5’10” quarterbacks who never got drafted don’t get documentaries. They vanish, so the sample you’re judging from is rigged toward success before you even start counting.
The availability heuristic is the second. In laymen’s terms: whatever is easy to remember feels common. One unforgettable underdog story feels more real than a spreadsheet of a thousand quiet failures. Feeling is not frequency. Your brain trades one for the other anyway.
The third is the thrill of the story. Nobody writes a book about the person who did the sensible thing and got the sensible result. Normal is boring and routine. This is why the basketball player or rapper from the hood gets all the girls, while the safer, more conventional accountant, doctor, or lawyer gets no attention at all, even though they’re the statistically better “catch” than a man with a fleeting career as an athlete or entertainer. The outlier gets all the attention, and the outlier is, by definition, not what usually happens.
## The example nobody wants to touch
Back to that thread. It is absolutely possible to raise a child in a single-parent home who grows into a healthy, thriving adult. It happens every day, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong and usually cruel about it.
But possibility was never the claim. The claim was about probability, and the research on average outcomes isn’t a mystery. Kids raised within two-parent households have a significantly higher probability of success in life. We can attribute that success to a variety of factors. Maybe these households tend to have more resources, more supervision, and more stability, and the gap holds even after you control for income. However, the why is not the point. The point is that they have a higher probability of success.
The narrative that single parents can raise successful kids is a valid one, that’s because it IS possible. That’s the yes or no question. It is possible, but not probable. And the problem many have with this reality is not a factual problem, its an emotional problem. It feels icky to acknowledge a high probability of failure…and for most, this acknowledgement becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Remember we tend to only see outcomes, yes, no possibilities. So if its a “yes” answer to the question of “is this possible, we will almost always interpret this is a 100% probability.
We have to remember, a probability is a description of a distribution, not a verdict on your family. It helps to understand that a lower probability still contains millions of successes, and plenty of single parents beat the odds through sheer effort. But make no mistake about it, the odds are NOT in your favor.
In many of these online debates, both sides of the equation are almost always misguided because they weight too heavily on their perspectives. One side waves the exception around as if the exception erased the odds. The other side waves odds around like as if the exception is an impossibility. Ironically, both are regressing to the mean of the binary human perspective, yes or no.
Same error, opposite directions. The honest position holds both facts at once: the good outcome is fully possible, and it is also, on average, harder to reach. You’re allowed to say both. I always say, you don’t have to pick a team, you dont have to have an opinion or “hot take” on everything. Objectivity is allowed.
I never do.
The outlier machine
Our national news media and social media are awashed in sensationalism, amplifying outliers because outliers make great stories and great stories keep people engaged, online, scrolling and glued to their televisions. We are trained from birth to see and celebrate outliers. Our entire society is built on the propagation of outliers. and we are feed outliers until they feel normal. Some great examples of this are the common get rich quick schemes, the rags to riches entrepreneurs, the muscular, masculine guy who has it all, the black criminal, the purple haired liberal, the red neck racist, the Bible thumping conservative.
Your feed is not a sample of reality. It’s a sample of whatever performs, and improbable stories perform. You see the guy who quit his job with no plan and got rich. You don’t see the ten thousand who quit with no plan and went broke, because broke is not content.
The algorithm isn’t lying to you. It’s showing you a wildly unrepresentative slice and letting your own brain finish the job.
Play the odds anyway
Now, the strongest objection to everything I just wrote: I’m a self-taught entrepreneur from Mississippi who built a career out of self-improvement books, connections, and many, many reps in the exciting game of failure. My entire life is that of an outlier, an outlier that learned how to play the odds. I’m successful because I continue to examine my odds and make decisions based on those odds.
It’s about knowing which question you’re answering before you put money on it. When the outcome matters, ask how often this actually works for people in your situation, not whether it ever worked for anyone, anywhere, once. Develop a baseline on the average first. Then decide, deliberately, whether the long shot is worth it. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s worth the glory. I know it’s hard, but minimize the impact of the outcome in your head. Most of the time, dangers only exist in our heads. There are two quotes that help me with this.
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” – Mark Twain
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” – Marcus Aurelius
Celebrate the rare success. It’s proof the door isn’t locked, and that proof matters. Just don’t confuse the trophy for the odds. In sports, in raising kids, in business, in money, in the choices you make on a normal Tuesday, the same discipline holds.
Possible tells you the door is open. Probable tells you what’s on the other side.
Learn the difference. Bookmark this.
