Life Isn't a Formula. It's a Game of Probabilities.
What learning analytics taught me about good decisions, bad outcomes and dealing with life's uncertainties.
One of the most valuable lessons I learnt when I got into data analytics had surprisingly little to do with data. It changed how I understood problems, made decisions and responded when things didn't turn out as expected.
The lesson was simple: not every problem has a solution that guarantees the outcome we want.
For many of life's most important decisions, the best we can do is improve our chances of getting there.
It sounds obvious, but appreciating this distinction can fundamentally change how we look at life.
When good advice doesn't deliver
“Study hard, get good grades, and you'll have a good future.”
“Eat well and exercise regularly, and you'll live a long and healthy life.”
“Work hard, and success will follow.”
Most of us grew up hearing these familiar words of wisdom, often from parents and elders who genuinely wanted the best for us. And much of this advice makes sense.
But we also know people who excelled academically yet struggled to find good jobs, or who lived healthy lifestyles but developed serious illnesses. Others worked hard for decades, only to be retrenched.
Does that make the advice wrong?
I don't think so.
The problem is often not the advice itself, but how we understand it.
We mistake advice that improves our chances of success for advice that guarantees it.
And when life doesn't deliver what we expected, we feel cheated and start looking for someone to blame. But life rarely works that neatly.
What the data actually tells us
Take the familiar advice to study hard.
Does a degree really improve your earning prospects?
Singapore's income data offers an interesting perspective.
The chart below compares the distribution of gross monthly income among degree holders and those with diplomas or professional qualifications.
There is a clear pattern.
Degree holders are more heavily represented in the higher income bands. Those with diplomas or professional qualifications are more concentrated in the lower and middle income bands.
This supports the familiar advice that education can improve our earning prospects.
But look a little closer.
Some degree holders earn below S$3,000 a month, while some diploma holders earn above S$10,000. The distributions overlap.
In other words, although degree holders tend to have better earning outcomes as a group, having a degree does not guarantee that any particular individual will earn more than someone with a diploma.
Of course, this chart includes people across different ages, occupations and industries. It does not isolate the effect of education from experience, job choices or other factors.
Nor does it tell us exactly what any particular individual's chances are. But it illustrates something important about how we interpret evidence.
A pattern that holds across a population does not necessarily hold for every individual within it.
And that is precisely the distinction between improving the odds and guaranteeing an outcome.
Not all problems work the same way
Some problems are relatively simple and predictable.
Put your hand into a fire and you will get burnt.
But will studying harder guarantee a better career? Will working longer hours make a business more successful? Will exercising regularly ensure a longer life? These are far more complicated questions.
Education, effort and healthy habits matter. But so do market conditions, personal circumstances, genetics, opportunities, other people's decisions and sometimes plain luck.
This was one of the most important distinctions I came to appreciate through analytics.
For some problems, we can predict outcomes with considerable confidence. For others, we can only estimate the likelihood of different outcomes. And sometimes, we don't even know enough to estimate the odds reliably.
That changes how we should approach decisions. Instead of simply asking, “Will this work?”, perhaps we should ask:
“How likely is it to work, under what circumstances, and what happens if it doesn't?”
Suppose one option offers a 70% chance of success and another offers 40%.
Assuming the benefits, costs and consequences are otherwise comparable, choosing the 70% option would seem sensible. But a 70% chance of success still means a 30% chance of failure. If we chose the first option and failed, while someone else chose the second and succeeded, would that make our decision wrong?
Not necessarily.
A good decision can produce a bad outcome. And a bad decision can sometimes produce a good one.
Yet we often judge the quality of decisions entirely by their outcomes, usually with the benefit of hindsight.
That can lead us to learn the wrong lessons.
What golf taught me about life
As someone who enjoys golf, I particularly appreciate this quote, commonly attributed to Bobby Jones:
Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots — but you have to play the ball where it lies.
Anyone who plays golf knows the feeling.
You can execute a beautiful shot, only for an unfortunate bounce to send the ball into a bunker. On another occasion, a terrible shot might bounce off a tree and land in the middle of the fairway. That doesn't make the terrible shot better than the good one.
Over time, consistently making better shots should improve our chances of a better score. But there are no guarantees on any individual shot. And the most important part of the quote?
You have to play the ball where it lies.
Complaining about an unfair bounce doesn't change where the ball landed.
You still have to decide what to do next, based on the circumstances you actually face.
Isn't that much like life?
Advice is useful. But judgement still matters.
I can appreciate the attractiveness of simple rules and guaranteed outcomes. They provide clarity, comfort and the convenience of having someone to blame when things go wrong. But there is also wisdom in being careful about taking advice from someone who doesn't have to live with the consequences.
That doesn't mean we should ignore advice, particularly from people with greater knowledge or experience. Our parents and elders often offered simple advice with good intentions. It provided useful direction when we were too young to appreciate life's complexities. But as adults, we need to recognise that advice is rarely complete.
What works for someone else may not work for us. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. And ultimately, we are the ones who must live with our decisions.
This is where critical thinking and self-awareness become our best friends.
Before jumping to a solution, understand the problem. Question your assumptions. Consider other explanations. Test your hypotheses against the evidence. If working harder isn't helping your career, perhaps the answer isn't simply to work even harder. Perhaps your skills are no longer as relevant, or your efforts are not directed at the opportunities that matter. Equally, don't abandon a sound approach just because it produced one disappointing result. Sometimes, it really was just a bad bounce.
The challenge is knowing when to persist, when to adapt and when to change direction altogether.
Test, learn and adapt
Another important lesson analytics taught me is that even successful solutions need to be revisited. Circumstances change. Industries evolve. Technologies advance. Our own priorities shift. An approach that worked brilliantly five years ago may no longer be appropriate today.
That is why I believe we should continue testing our assumptions, observing the results and learning. Not every failure means our decision was wrong. Not every success proves we were right. And perhaps most importantly, we need enough self-awareness to recognise when our attachment to a particular belief prevents us from seeing the evidence.
For me, this has been one of the most liberating lessons from analytics. I no longer need to believe that every good decision must produce a good outcome, or that every disappointment means someone made a mistake. Instead, I can focus on making the best decision I reasonably can with the information available, understanding the risks and learning from what happens. Of course, not everything is within our control. Recognising that isn't an excuse to avoid responsibility. It helps us focus on what we can actually influence.
Play the ball where it lies
Life isn't a mathematical formula where doing A and B will always produce C.
Much of it is a complicated combination of decisions, circumstances and luck. The advice passed down by earlier generations wasn't necessarily wrong. It was often a useful simplification of a much more complicated reality. As we grow older, our responsibility is to understand the reasoning behind that advice, recognise its limitations and adapt it to our circumstances. Perhaps that is the most important lesson analytics has taught me.
Good decision-making isn't about guaranteeing success. It's about improving the odds, managing the risks and learning to make better decisions.
And when things don't go our way?
We can complain about the bounce, or focus on making the next shot count.
After all, we still have to play the ball where it lies.
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