Volume Negates Luck

A post about an aphorism I like

Alex Hormozi has an aphorism that goes like this: “volume negates luck.” I don’t know too much about Hormozi, but that phrase stuck out to me.

He gave an example to illustrate what he means:

When I took the GMAT to get into Harvard, my first score was like ok, it wasn’t great. But I read this study on how to do well on standardized tests. And they had this graph [that] went like this: the more problems you did, the higher your test score was [on average].

So I bought 16 [phonebook-thick] test prep books and I did four hours of problems everyday for three months. And then I scored in the 99-point-whatever percentile, because it was just input-output.

I was naturally not even that good at math, but I just was like “if I do 10,000 fucking problems, I’ll start to just understand how these problems get asked.”¹

Volume negates luck is a valuable aphorism because it applies to so many different areas in life. If there’s anything you want to get better at, don’t just hope you’ll get lucky and it’ll magically happen. You’ve gotta spend more time working on it. It will often be the case that your success with a certain outcome is proportional to the time you put in.

This post initially appeared on my substack.