The Lie of “It Won’t Happen to Me”
One of the many quirks of human beings is that we tend to think we’re going to somehow, some way, be the exception to the rule. You’re going to be the guy who snorts coke and doesn’t get hooked, transitions into a woman and looks super-hot, or shoplifts regularly and never gets caught.
However, there’s a fine line between optimism and delusion, which we’re constantly misled about online. As Zuby said in one of the best quotes of 2025:
“This is a reminder that virtually everything you see on the news and going viral on social media is an anomaly by definition. ‘Normal’ doesn’t go viral.”
Online, we’re incessantly bombarded with unusual stories and eye-catching behavior.
Do you remember when Charlie Sheen was heavily drugged up and completely out of his mind, but ranting about “tiger blood,” and it was somehow still cool?
Want to know how many drugged-up people I’ve ever met that were one-quarter as fun and entertaining as he was then?
None. Ever.
Even the Wall Street Journal puts out crap like this:
How many people even know someone in a throuple, much less a successful throuple? On the other hand, open marriages are more common:
Like anybody who has had a lot of friends and has been around for a while, I’ve known more than a few people in open marriages. I’ve never seen it “save” anyone’s marriage, although I’ve seen it wreck more than a few. To the extent that open marriages last in the real world (and usually they don’t last long), it almost always tends to be the woman humping away, while the humiliated guy hangs in there because he doesn’t want to lose her.
In other words, it gets sold to everyone as the world’s tastiest punch, but everyone who tries to drink it soon realizes that there’s a turd floating in it.
You probably have never heard of Freddie Blom, but he lived to 116 and was at one time the world’s oldest man. Guess what? He was a lifetime smoker. Does that mean smoking isn’t bad for your health? Not at all, that just means he had some combination of luck and genetics that allowed him to tolerate it without ruining him. Do you have that same combination of luck and genetics? Almost certainly not.
What is the lottery? It’s mostly poor people paying a voluntary tax for a 1-in-300 million chance of getting life-changing money. What is Las Vegas? It’s people losing their houses, becoming addicted to gambling, and sitting in smoke-filled rooms for hours, throwing away large amounts of money while mindlessly pulling on slots in hopes of getting a 1-in-50 million jackpot.
Now, it’s true that some people beat the odds, so should you try to be one of them? Well, there’s a quote about business that’s extraordinarily applicable in situations like this:
What were the odds that Michael Jordan would become the NBA goat? Pretty low, but he was an athletically gifted, particularly driven player who made it to the NBA. He made it happen despite the odds against him being long, but my odds would be zero.
There are all sorts of things where you’re practically out of the running before you start. You’re probably not going to date Billie Eilish, become the next President, or cure cancer. SOMEBODY will do these things, but even though the odds are against them, too, they won’t be starting from scratch.
In other words, there are times to buck the odds. In the immortal words of Elon Musk:
Still, to have that attitude, you need to have already put in a lot of work and be doing a lot of things right. Elon is a brilliant guy with unlimited money, extraordinary management skills, and the ability to draw the best talent on earth to work with him. That’s why he can successfully tackle tasks that look impossible to everyone else.
What about you? What can you tackle?
Well, that depends on what you’re willing to put your time, resources, and soul into. It means doing the right thing over and over again, not relying on luck or testing out “novel theories” proposed by unhappy weirdos on the Internet.
Again, there are always exceptions to the rules, but most people finish in life about where you’d expect them to in health, money, success, and relationships. Chances are, you’re not going to be a centenarian eating McDonald’s every day or get rich by plunking money into the right crypto alt-coin (This one has to work because it’s the first cryptocurrency with a Platypus on it!).
The truth is that most people can be healthy, relatively successful, relatively wealthy, and have good relationships, along with a happy life. However, it requires consistently doing the right things over decades to make that happen.
Most of the people getting wins in any area are the people doing the right things in that area, over and over, across a long time span. That’s not a sexy message in the world of “Six-minute abs,” “This superfood melts off the pounds,” and “Here’s how to make millions in months,” but it has the advantage of being true.
The more we look for the sexy messages, the shortcuts, and the exceptions to the rule, the more likely we are to fall short of where we want to go. Most people know what to do, but it’s hard, and it takes a long time. Yet, in life, those are still the routes that get the overwhelming majority of people where they want to go. Stop looking for exceptions and just stick to the damn rules, and you will go further over time than the vast majority of human beings around you.
In our increasing immediate satisfaction and everyone is a victim and gets a trophy society; the lesson of incremental progress and persistence is so lost on so many people.
I built a manufacturing business from the ground up. When people come to visit, they look around at the facility and the activity and ask, "without a background in that, how did you manage to get this done?" That question is always perplexing to me as I just put together a plan and kept tacking one project and one problem at a time... moving forward.
Someone that builds a house knows this thing. Most people just buy a house and don't get the building process is one of incremental steps and progress.
I am always schooling young people on this... the 10,000 hour rule. I tell them that making a good living requires becoming a master in some discipline that has commercial value. Working full-time is 2080 hours a year. So if someone practices a discipline full-time for about five years, they will become a master. If they put in 20 hours a week, it will take ten years. If they are really smart, dedicated and focused, they might reduce the time required, but the point is that they have to invest in becoming a master.
I tell them that thinking their college degree qualifies them for a good career is bunk. The truth is that college is actually a delay in career launch, and they would need to make up the time once they start working after graduating. The only thing the degree provides is a leg up in the hiring competition, but someone that started working earlier while attending night school would generally be in a much better competitive place.
It is fantastic how people look at someone successful and think, with some resentment, that it happened quickly or was based on luck. They look at Elon Musk for example and claim that he is just lucky and that his wealth is just a recent thing... ignoring all the steps he took, and all the challenges he had to overcome, to get where he is today.
Life is a climb, not a boat ride.
When I started teaching high school, every year I had a couple of students that were entrepreneurs. The Internet made it easy for these kids to start a business and if they stuck with it, they could make it work. I had a few students that were earning double my salary. Upon graduation, they were not going to college, they were well on their way to becoming very successful business people.
Today, the majority of my students have no interest in working at anything except to be a rapper, a YouTube influencer, or a sports star. They think it is very easy to make lots of money for very little work. Most do not even graduate because they do not need school. Those that do graduate usually meet their graduation requirements by doing credit recovery. They failed every class for 2 years and so enter credit recovery where they can earn credits by taking online classes after school where they only read and take a test. The test answers are shared by the students and are freely available. All they do is stare at the computer screen, hit a button every 20 seconds to stay in the online course, then pull out their slip of paper with the answers to pass the test. They can do 4 years of school in one year.
When they get out, they are unemployable and most decide to just live at home because their parents let them play video games all the time.
Now schools are pushing DEI, such as the lowest grade a student can earn is 50%, even if they did not do the assignment or test because we do not want them digging a hole they cannot get out of. They have learned they only need to work the last three weeks of a semester to make it to 60% so they can pass.
This is not real life. One can dig a hole so deep they cannot get out of it. Why are a large proportion of homeless drug addicted? Their only goal is to score the next high and for them, rock bottom is when they finally OD and die. Today, there are plenty of people and governmental agencies that are willing to give them all the money they need to continue on their current, downward spiral.
I find it ironic that I attended high school during the Great Recession of the 70s. Since I was 8, I always had a job. My first was a paper route. By 8th grade, I had taken up horse back riding. I paid for everything by working at a horse ranch 7 days a week. I spent 4 hours after school every day and 10 hours on Saturdays and Sundays. I worked 60 to 80 hours a week during the summer. I eventually was able to give riding lessons, train horses for other people and I was able to get my driver's license at 14 because I was working on a ranch. I could only drive to and from work and for ranch related jobs. I was driving a 2.5 ton flatbed once a week during the summer over the Sierra Nevada to Carson Valley to pick up a load of hay. I had to load and unload the hay myself.
I enjoyed the work. I made my job by finding something that others did not want to do and then becoming good at it.
I was working at this job through community college. At the community college, and went through a trade program to learn about Electron Microscopy. There were only two places in the US at that time that taught this. After I graduated, I went to a 4 year university, got a job working in a lab operating an electron microscope and paid my way through school. I also married my wife during this time. We have. been married 41 years now. She was working her way through college.
I even knew how to service the Electron Microscope so I saved the lab money by servicing it myself and they did not have to call in a technician every time it went down. I was given a few substantial pay raises.
I had learned from my grandfather, that lived through the Depression and was never out of a job more than 24 hours. He started working at the age of 8 after his father committed suicide after the 1929 crash (his father lost everything). He got their broken down Model T running and immediately found a job delivering goods to local stores.He then converted it to a dump truck and got jobs on road construction projects.
My grandfather worked until the age of 85. He had to stop working due to health problems and passed away at the age of 87.
I am retiring after this school year. That only means I will be leaving one job, moving to be near my son, his wife, and my young grandson. I will also find a job so I have something to do.