Relax, Think, Imagine, Make it possible

I see on facebook and other networks some apps that show how similar you are with your friends. In the real world as well it is a common belief that people with the same interests are a great match.

From my point of view, this is quite boring. It’s good to be with people that have other interests than the ones you have. It’s the only way of getting out of a world that you have built and exploring new activities. You can gain some life-changing experiences when you do this, trust me.

So next time you hear about a “perfect match” think again if that’s what you are looking for. It is safe to say that you want to live your life with people that like and do common things with you but as most of the times, safety kills the excitement.

I like maths a lot but most of all I like anything that has to do with a probability. But what really amazes me is how probability is connected to human perception. People are not robots and they don’t act always in a logical way. What sometimes might seem as reasonable can also be impossible if you put it down to numbers. How strong you feel that something might happen is totally different about how possible it is to actually happen. Based on that theory there are a lot of businesses created all over the world. Casinos are one of them.

I don’t know if you have ever been at a casino but if you haven’t you should visit one. Be careful though… go there not for the obvious reason (winning/losing money). Go there to see and analyze how people act knowing the probabilities of winning a game. You will be amazed on how stronger the emotions are from logical thinking.
That being said, I am going to describe my method of playing which most of you will find stupid and boring. I call it “I am very happy once every 18.5 days”. But first let’s do a flashback. Remember when you where a child and you had a small piggy bank? Probably most of you had one and you were collecting money frequently. When there was a special time like your birthday for example you had to broke mr. piggy and you could use the money to buy anything you wanted. Note that you were not disappointed when you put money into mr. piggy because you knew that some day you would take them back but you were very happy once you got them all together.

So this is my method: Play only an amount that you are comfortable of losing (I play 20 euros) and play it only once on the roulette (I split it into two numbers). Believe it or not I am only playing once each time I visit a casino and I don’t go there often. But once every 18.5 times I leave the casino very happy because one of my 10 euro bets gives me 360 euros. The rest of the times I am just leaving the casino happy knowing that the 20 euros were a reasonable amount to spent to have a drink (which by the way is free at the casino). Over time, the experience to be very happy costs you 10 euros for every time you are very happy (this is what the casino makes from paying you 36 times the bet and not 37). Well, that’s the cost of breaking mr. piggy!

But why once every 18.5 times?

Well, obviously if you had split your bet over red or black you would be happy once every two times. But you wouldn’t be much happy. You would just double your money. It would happen more often but you wouldn’t get the excitement of a *36 return on investment:) Depending on how often you visit a casino and how you set your happiness level you might want to change this. On another point of view, if you play at a lottery the most chances are that you won’t win even if you played everyday for 1000 years but if you do win you will be a lot happier than winning 18 times your money at the roulette.

So as a final advice: Setup your happiness levels and don’t play out of them. At a range of 1 to 10, 1 is losing a reasonable amount of money (not more than what you would have paid for a typical night at a bar) and 10 multiplying your money by a great factor. Remember though: Always leave happy. Because if you do the mistake to play that reasonable amount of money several times the same day you won’t leave happy!

I like the chaos theory since it was the main part of my studies. Chaos theory is explained in common words as the butterfly effect. In a few words it means that a small change in the initial conditions of a problem can cause large scale changes over time.

What does this mean to business success?

Well, I have been watching several extremely successful entrepreneurs and what I found out so far is that many of them went from good to great because of a tiny change in their life. Moreover, this change might not even had to do with business itself. They met someone special, they were at the right place in the right time but almost all do not credit their success to day-to-day business activities. These are to maintain a successful business.

Personally, in my life, success always came from non business related factors. I can recall meeting someone during holidays at a place where I wouldn’t have been anyway and then doing business together, or even finding the right person in very unusual circumstances. On the other hand, I met my girlfriend after searching for a house for my parents. In all these situations I wasn’t searching for what I actually found, but the result was a success.

My point is that life is very strange and unpredictable. You should not expect great success from a well known path. Of course you should not expect either strange things to happen in your life in order to have great success. What you can do is to always be ready to identify what is going on every moment in your life and how that might help you succeed in any factor. If you are totally busy executing your plan without being able to identify the opportunities around you then you will loose the game. You will be successful but you will not enjoy great success.