A 99% failure rate = great at your job?

Hi guys, I had a very interesting discussion with my reader Amanda. We talked about the difference between jobs where you can have a very high failure rate and still be regarded as normal, whilst there are jobs where you are expected to deliver 100% of the time. Now you may consider someone who fails as much as 90% of the time to be bad at his job, but allow me to use my friend Carl as a case study: Carl is an estate agent who does high end luxury real estate. His job is basically to show potential buyers these incredible properties and his success rate is low: it does vary from month to month of course but typically we're talking about a success rate of between 1% to 3%, that means out of 100 potential buyers he meets, you can count the number of sales he makes on one hand. Is Carl bad at his job? Hardly, he is making a lot of money as the commission from just one sale is a pretty big sum of money. He is charming, devilishly handsome, well-dressed and on top of all that, he's very good with using social media to promote new properties - in fact, it is hard to find fault with the way Carl is doing his job. The nature of his industry is such that any one looking for a new home would see several options before making a purchase and even if they do like Carl, they may not think the property he has shown them is their ideal new home so they may go with another estate agent who may not be as charming but has shown them a nicer property. Such is the nature of a sales job, the failure rate is very high and that is considered quite normal: so as long as he earns enough money to make a good living despite these circumstances, he's doing quite well. 

Allow me to talk about another industry that I know extremely well - acting. When a director is looking to cast an actor in a role, they would put a casting call out and probably receive submissions from a large number of agents. Let's imagine they receive about 250 submissions, they will then invite about 25 of the most credible actors to an audition The next step would be the view all the audition tapes and then create a final shortlist of about 3 or 4 actors who are very suitable for the role. They would then conduct what is known as a 'call back', which is a second audition during which they spent much longer, even up to an hour with each of those actors to see how they perform in order to try to arrive at a decision. In fact, I have even heard of cases where they do a second and even third call back when the casting directors just can't choose between two actors who are both excellent but bring different qualities to the role. Ultimately, they will have to pick only one but it doesn't mean that the others whom they rejected were terrible and untalented - in fact, I would say that anyone who even gets invited to attend the first audition is already doing pretty well because a casting director has decided that they're good enough to be considered. Such is the nature of the casting process where you will only have one actor who walks away screaming, "yes! I got the part!" whilst the others are all going to be disappointed, but it doesn't mean that they were rejected because they 'failed' at acting - no, it is a very harsh selection process and thus the odds of succeeding are extremely low - such is the nature of this process. Hence even the most successful A-list actors in Hollywood would still face this kind of rejection all the time during the casting process no matter how talented they are. 

Likewise, for someone like Amanda who is a scientist, her situation is quite similar to those involved in R&D (research and development) - these scientists are in the lab all day conducting experiments, trying to find a solution and their success rate can be very low, especially if they're trying to do something that no one has ever done before (like develop a cure for Covid-19). I am particularly intrigued by the story of Nikola Tesla - his story is too long to retell here and I would direct you to the Wikipedia page on him instead, but the bottom line is that he was a brilliant scientist who was pushing the limits of technology known to mankind at that time with his many experiments. Many of these failed because he was simply way too far ahead of his time, but a small number of those experiments did work and we still remember him for his inventions today. Was Tesla a bad scientist or engineer because so many his experiments failed? No, in fact he is considered one of the brightest geniuses of all time and he had the fortitude to pursue his ideas even when faced with a lot of skepticism from his peers. Now let's contrast Tesla to something from my childhood in Singapore: my favourite Singaporean dish is laksa - that famous seafood curry noodle soup and Singaporeans have a very clear idea about exactly how laksa ought to taste, smell and look, we know exactly which ingredients need to be present in a perfect bowl of laksa. So if you want to sell laksa in Singapore, you need to master the recipe, have all the right ingredients in the right proportions in order to satisfy your demanding customers. There are places which have perfected this art and have become quite famous in Singapore for the quality of their laksa, but we're talking about a stunning level of consistency when it comes to the quality of their product: every single bowl of laksa they sell is identical, made to the same standard. 

So imagine if you made the trip to Katong for their famous Katong laksa and the gravy was too spicy, too salty, too sour or too bland, you would immediately complain and demand either a replacement or a refund. You would not tolerate the failure or mistake in this case because you have paid for a perfect bowl of their famous Katong laksa.  The hawker would be quite happy to put things right, in order to make sure that you are a satisfied customer who would return in the future and he wants to maintain his reputation for excellent laksa. Carl and the laksa hawker would be at opposite ends of the spectrum: Carl could have a success rate as low as 1% whilst the laksa hawker has to maintain a success rate of 100% - yet if you met a man who was an estate agent, you wouldn't automatically associate him with failure. No, in fact there are plenty of people with jobs just like Carl in our society and what they do isn't considered unusual at all. As someone who works in sales, I am in the same situation as Carl since I work in sales - I speak to a lot of people and if I am able to convert a small handful of them into sales, then I can earn enough money to keep me in the lifestyle I am accustomed to. So the question really that some people would ask at this stage is what it is like to live with a 99% failure rate in your daily work? Don't you get upset, frustrated or angry on a day when you don't make a sale? How do you deal with that level of constant disappointment just trying to do your job? So why are some people suited for such roles but not others?

There are also jobs out there which fall in between the two extremes of 100% success and 1% success - I enjoy the videos of a Youtuber called 'The Tim Traveller' - he is a British guy who lives in France and makes quirky travel videos. He is multi-lingual and witty; he does a lot of research to make each video unique and informative - it is this winning formula that makes me want to watch his videos. Currently, he has 206,000 subscribers and has chalked up 24.8 million views on Youtube. He is lucky in that he is successful enough to become a full time Youtuber, but in a recent video, he explained how he is still completely baffled by how Youtube algorithms work. Last year during the lockdown, he did a video about the fake buildings of Paris and that chalked up over 5 million views in a very short period of time - it is his most popular video to date. He thought he had hit a gold mine, there are loads of people out there who are very interested in this (rather niche) topic. So he did a follow up video on more fake buildings in Paris and that one barely attracted 70,000 views (including me of course, since I watch all his videos). This has left Tim baffled as he can't explain why the first video attracted so many views but the second failed to do so - in fact 70,000 is a lot less than what his other videos usually attract, most of them manage a few hundred thousand views. It would have been reasonable to assume that the people who watched the first video would also want to watch the follow up but apparently not. The fact is Tim can put in the same amount of hard work into producing two videos on a very similar subject but get a totally different outcome. Could you do a task when the outcomes can be very uncertain, unpredictable and sometimes even defy logic? 

To understand this, allow me to bring you to my gymnastics club where my training has resumed: when I am doing skills well within my capabilities, I find them easy and there is virtually no risk of me falling. However, when I am pushing the limits of my ability and trying a new skill, then the chances of me actually getting right on the first attempt are virtually zero - I always tell younger gymnasts not to get frustrated with themselves when learning a new skill as there will inevitably be a lot of falling involved when you're trying an unfamiliar and new skill. In my gymnastics training, I split my time between practicing skills I already know how to do and trying to learn new skills - so there's always a lot of falling associated with the latter. I have seen some people try gymnastics and then give up: all that falling in the early stages of learning new skills becomes just too frustrating. They would rather take on an activity like jogging or swimming, where they already know how to run or swim and thus there's no element of failure when they exercise but by the same token, they're not learning anything new either. Gymnasts learn to cope with failure as we simply accept that this is just a part of the learning process: with each fall, we analyze what we need to do to try to improve and we try again until that one day when we finally master the skill. It is a personal choice whether you choose to pursue a sport like gymnastics where you are constantly taken out of your comfort zone or jogging, where you're staying well within your comfort zone. I would probably find an activity like jogging boring and I'd try to challenge myself to run faster and faster in order to set myself goals and targets, but hey, that's just my character, which is probably why I was attracted to gymnastics in the first place. 

Thus different people are attracted to different careers and sports - we pick a path that suits our personality. The hawkers of Singapore can spend years, even decades making the same dish over and over again until they perfect the recipe: some people might seek comfort in knowing that they are experts in what they do whilst others might find the repetitive nature of doing the same tasks over and over again, day after day to be way too boring. I have a friend who works as a chef in a big restaurant and she has to learn how to make a wide variety of dishes that feature on the restaurant's menu. Whilst she chose this career because she loves cooking, an aspect of the job she enjoys is learning new skills, such as working with new ingredients and learning how to prepare new dishes with them. If she left that restaurant and was placed in a hawker center where she only cooked one dish every single day, I think she would get bored very quickly. Likewise, my gymnastics club is part of a multi-purpose sports facility and I remember there was this instructor who led an aerobics class for older ladies in the next hall. She would use the same CD, do the same exact routine every time she did the class and I thought, well that's kinda lazy. Would it be too much to ask for you to even use a different piece of music for each class or vary the kind of exercises you did? Well, I did ask the instructor that question and she told me that the older ladies who attended her class didn't like to be surprised with new challenges and they came to her class knowing exactly what to expect - that was part of the reason they felt safe to come back class after class and so doing the same simple exercises over and over again was ideal for older ladies who lacked confidence when it came to sports.

So have we identified the crux of the issue here - is it just all about confidence then? These older ladies who attended that same aerobics class, well - perhaps I shouldn't use the word 'aerobics' lest it gives you the wrong impression. It's more like a movement class, the instructor puts on a medley of 1970s and 1980s pop music and they do a series of dance-like movements, all extremely simple of course. The older ladies keep coming as they get some exercise, they get to see their friends - for them, going to the class is as much a social activity as well as the chance to keep fit. They have neither the ambition nor the desire to try to learn anything new at their age, so the instructor is merely giving them the kind of lesson they want (and they are the paying customers). Going back to my friend Carl the estate agent, he makes a very small number of sales a year but the commission from each sale is a lot - Carl has the confidence that he will make another sale in the not so distant future in order to keep doing what he does, even if we know that 99% of the time, he will not make a sale but he has the confidence to keep going. He doesn't know when his next sale might happen but he has enough faith in his capabilities that it will happen because he is doing everything right. So is Carl's situation that unusual? I don't think so - imagine if an 18 year old student goes to university, she believes she will graduate in 3 years with a degree. It takes confidence to believe that she can complete the course successfully and pass all the exams. Sure, there is the possibility that she may flunk her exams and not graduate at all, but she just has to have enough self-belief to know that she has the ability to do what it takes to avoid the worst case scenario and to deliver a good outcome. 

There are some people who would not be able to put up with a high failure rate in their career - they would not be able to do what Carl does, instead they would need constant reassurance and encouragement to know that they are performing well. Perhaps then this has a lot to do with one's upbringing? I am thinking of my nephew's school environment - I have already shared a lot of horror stories about how awful his teachers are (such as using woefully outdated teaching material); he told me that the students are genuinely very afraid of asking questions in the classroom because the teacher would scold them for being stupid or lazy instead of answering the question. Of course, the teachers at his school are just plain awful, they should all be sacked of course but my point is simple: if that is your experience when any kind of failure (in this case, simply asking the teacher a question during a lesson = you've failed to understand it the first time the teacher explained) is met with such hostility, then you would become very afraid to fail. Whereas if the teacher is a lot more willing to deal with students who have questions and don't understand the lesson, then the students would be a lot more relaxed about dealing with failure in the future. Could it be that such bad teachers and parents are the ones responsible for adults being extremely anxious and afraid of any kind of failure at all - that they naturally gravitate towards jobs where a 100% success rate is the norm? Is this an aspect of our character building that we have some control over - or is this a nature vs nurture matter, whereby our innate preferences are hardwired into our subconscious?

Not all jobs that demand 100% success rate are the same - there is a wide variety of jobs that fit that description of demanding a 100% success rate. I have talked about the laksa hawker who is expected to deliver the same consistent quality when it comes to his laksa everyday and I have also talked about the aerobics instructor who delivers the same class all the time to her older students. However, it doesn't mean that people who do jobs in this category are somehow poorer or less skilled just because I had picked those two examples - in contrast, I remember when I had my Lasik operation in Singapore, the eye surgeon who operated on me assured me that he has a success rate of over 99.9%, so the chances of anything going wrong with my eyes during the operation was extremely low. He assured me that it was just another simple procedure for him and he performs many of those operations a day. I wanted to laugh at that because if it was really such a simple operation akin to getting a manicure, then why was it so expensive? But when it comes to having an eye operation, I like the sound of the 99.9% success rate because I only have one pair of eyes and I didn't want anything to go wrong with my eyes! Who in the right mind would undergo eye surgery if the doctor said that the success rate was as low as 50% or 30%? So that eye surgeon is performing a very highly skilled job with an impressively high success rate and needless to say, he is making a lot of money because he has a lot of very happy customers and he needs to continue having that great 99.9% success rate, in order for his eye clinic to keep doing such good business. 

I have seen people struggle in the wrong role before - I remember way back in 2003, there was this young guy whom we shall refer to as Keith (not his real name) in my office, this sales job was his first job out of university and he was so close to making his first sale when the deal fell through. To be fair to Keith, everything was agreed with the client and for no apparent reason, the client pulled out and changed his mind at the last minute without telling Keith why. It was intensely frustrating for Keith and he was very upset - a few of us sat down with him and said, "listen mate, it's not your fault, nobody is blaming you. You just have to move on and work towards the next sale, unfortunately this kind of thing will happen a lot in this job." But Keith quit before the end of the week which actually surprise me - of course he was upset, I would be as well if I were in his shoes, but the fact that he felt it was a good enough reason to find a new job was surprising to me because I thought he was an intelligent, charming young man who could have thrived in sales - he simply could not deal with the disappointment. I did manage to track down Keith a few years later and he had taken on an administrative job with a local government office; that did surprise me as I thought Keith was vastly overqualified to do a job like that, but he was a lot happier there. The workload was heavy, the hours were long but it was straightforward enough: his objectives were very clear, he could achieve a 100% success rate in that role and his boss was very happy with his performance. I thought that he paid a high price in his quest for job satisfaction: Keith was not achieving his full potential in settling for an "easier" (and relatively lowly paid) job like that, but in his mind, it was a price well worth paying.

Could Keith have found a better paying job in an environment where he could have a 100% success rate? Perhaps, that's a hypothetical question at this stage - Keith's approach to this problem was simply to look for a role where the job was so easy there was virtually no way he could make a mistake. His solution came in the form of taking a boring administrative job processing huge volumes of paperwork, okay so he achieved his objective of 100% success rate but does it bother him that he is earning very little in this role? Doesn't he ever get bored doing this kind of admin work? We go back to the settler vs maximizer theory: can this theory be used to explain Keith's mindset - is he a settler or just someone who lacks the social skills to cope with disappointment in life? Could we turn a settler into a maximizer by giving them the right kind of social skills to deal with such challenges? There is no easy answer to that of course: so imagine if Keith had trained to be a doctor specializing in eye surgery, his commitment to a 100% success rate would make him an excellent doctor. But no, he picked the wrong career path despite being well educated and perhaps the lesson we can learn from this is that young people like Keith need a lot more guidance and help when it comes to career advice and picking the right career path. I don't expect Keith to figure it all out for himself but surely there's no shame in asking for help? I imagine his commitment to a 100% success rate might serve him well in the hospitality industry - an exclusive five-star hotel would have that same level of commitment to make sure every single guest would be totally happy with their experience there. I imagine it would be the kind of work environment that would suit someone like Keith. 

So that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? What is your success rate in your current job? Are you in a position whereby you're expected to deliver 100% all the time or are you like my estate agent friend Carl, who has a remarkably low success rate of just 1% but still earns a lot of money? Could you deal with the uncertainty of not knowing when your next success will be? What do you think are the key factors that determine our relationship with success and failure? Have you ever met anyone like young Keith before? Are you more like Keith or perhaps you're more like Carl? And what more could we do to help young people who are like Keith? Do leave a message below please, many thanks for reading.