Play the Long Game

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been reading the book Moneyball. For those of you who may not be familiar with the book or movie, Moneyball is about the 2002 Oakland Athletics and their unique approach to baseball. To summarize, the Oakland A’s disregard, baseball traditions, and look to science and statistics to help them find success, even as a low budget team.

Though Moneyball is not a book about business, if you read between the lines, it’s actually the best business that I’ve ever read.

I’ve taken a lot of great lessons from this book, and for the purposes of this newsletter, I’d like to share one of them:

Now, don’t ask me to explain the math, but a professional statistician calculated that in any given major league baseball game, there is a one run difference due to skill, and a four run difference due to luck.

Over the course of a season, luck balances out and the significance of skill prevails. In any one game, however, basically anything can happen.

If you get down on yourself because of one loss, or even one lost series, you end up losing sight of the forest in the midst of the trees. Anyone can win one game, but hard work and skill win in the long run.

What’s the moral of the story?

For success and happiness in life, play the long game.