The Arithmetic of the Ordinary – Why it’s (near) impossible for you to make it
Most people, when they think of success, imagine it as a function of effort, a straightforward algorithm:
- Do more,
- Learn more,
- Endure more,
- And the world will bend to your persistence.
They carry within them an almost religious faith in motion, in work, in the compounding of small steps as if these were sufficient to open the gates of prosperity.
I have watched this faith for my considerable tangible years on this planet earth, not with disdain but with a certain reluctant admiration, because it is the faith that allows ordinary life to proceed without complete collapse.
Yet it is precisely this faith that blinds most, because it treats the universe as moral when it is statistical, as if the distribution of outcomes were governed by virtue, when in fact it obeys only power laws, entropy, and the quiet tyranny of chance.
Consider for a moment your own life. Imagine it as a plane of possibility, not infinite but constrained, not forgiving but indifferent, defined by time, energy, and the structure of systems into which you are inserted at birth.
You may strive, you may innovate, you may labor tirelessly, yet the very architecture of reality conspires against the average person attempting to “make it.” Not because you lack effort or intelligence, but because the rules of compounding advantage, variance, and structural scarcity are both unforgiving and absolute.
If you are willing to see it clearly, the reasons are simple, brutal, and elegant in their inevitability.
The average person cannot make it, and the logic behind this statement is neither subtle nor hidden.
The Tyranny of Distribution
To understand why most fail, you must first grasp the tyranny of distribution, the quiet law that governs all outcomes of value.
Consider wealth, innovation, fame, and even knowledge. In each of these, rewards follow a power law. A handful of individuals capture the overwhelming majority of upside, leaving the rest to the flat expanse of mediocrity.
This is not a zero-sum game; this is simple arithmetic.
You may work diligently for decades, yet the return on your labor will never approach the magnitude of the few whose trajectories happened to land on the right tail of the distribution curve.
Once again, this is not injustice; it is arithmetic.
Imagine two aspiring authors. Both write with equal skill and equal hours invested. One publishes a novel that, through a random intersection of taste, timing, and critical reception, becomes a bestseller. The other publishes a novel of similar quality but receives near-total silence.
Which of them is the more capable? By all observable metrics, you cannot tell.
By the metric that matters (the market), one is elevated into immortality while the other vanishes into statistical noise.
This is the essence of the tyranny. Outcomes are disproportionate to input, and luck masquerades as skill until the pattern becomes clear in retrospect.
Networks exacerbate this effect. Early entrants to a field accumulate credibility and social proof, which compound exponentially, while late entrants labor linearly.
Power laws are aided by network effects, by preferential attachment, and by the simple human tendency to follow visible success.
In technology, in finance, in culture, the latecomers face steeper odds not because they lack intelligence, but because the architecture of opportunity is already preempted by those who arrived first. Every incremental step toward parity requires exponentially more effort.
The middle class of ambition is a graveyard for those who underestimate the tyranny of distribution.
The tyranny also operates through deliberate, well-intended noise. The world does not reward raw skill alone; it rewards perceived skill, verified through known proxies such as credentials, prior success, and visibility. An average person, who lacks these signals, faces a gatekeeping structure invisible in its omnipresence.
To participate in high-return systems, you must convince others that you are already exceptional; without the initial signal, the system will filter you out before your merit is ever considered.
Finally, there is the tyranny of observability. You see the winners, their lives mapped in detail through biographies, media, and the gossip of communities. You do not see the thousands who failed similarly, whose trajectories closely mirrored the winners in effort and persistence but lacked the probabilistic alignment to succeed.
The result is that most attempt strategies that appear rational by emulation, unaware that they are repeating exercises of near-certain failure, thinking the distribution is uniform when it is fat-tailed.
The Prison of Time and Optionality
Time, unlike money, cannot be borrowed, stored, or leveraged without limit. Each person receives only a few decades of productive life. Within those decades, one must explore the space of opportunities, the corridors of optionality, and the deserts of dead ends.
The average person treats time linearly, converting hours directly into output, while the rare succeed by compounding time asymmetrically through systems, leverage, and asymmetric exposure.
Optionality is scarce. To place a bet that can transform one’s life without a catastrophic downside requires a handpicked combination of artificial and superficial tools of life: social, financial, and intellectual.
Without such a cushion, you cannot afford experiments, you cannot endure the volatility that produces exceptional outcomes.
The average individual plays only one hand, with borrowed chips, in a game designed for those who can afford to play thousands.
The history of innovation is littered with invisible hands that absorb risk. Those who survive the early experiments often do so because someone, somewhere, was already absorbing their downside.
Consider the man who wishes to build a company. He must pick the right industry, at the right time, with the right product, assembled into the right team. Each variable carries its own distribution of chance. To control them all is impossible; to predict them all is impossible. The more time passes, the more crowded the field becomes.
The optionality of first movers compounds into a permanent advantage. Late entrants may labor for decades and still fail, not because of incompetence, but because they are playing a game where the entry cost is already prohibitive. The payoffs are reserved for those who arrived earlier.
Even within personal decision-making, time imposes brutal constraints. Learning, experimenting, failing, and recovering are all linear processes, whereas opportunities often scale exponentially. One cannot “catch up” simply by working harder.
For every hour invested in improvement, someone else has already invested multiples more; their early advantage compounding invisibly into enormous gaps.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. The space of meaningful possibilities is effectively infinite, your lifetime finite, and your capacity to explore it severely limited.
The Fragility of Human Cognition
Even if one could understand distribution and optionality perfectly, the mind itself is a fragile instrument. It overestimates control, underestimates randomness, and mistakes noise for signal.
Every decision is filtered through cognitive biases, overconfidence, and the illusion of narrative coherence. The human brain is not designed to navigate heavy-tailed distributions; it is designed for survival in small-scale, low-variance environments.
Most failures of the average person are epistemic in nature. They see patterns where none exist, extrapolate trends linearly into chaotic domains, and misattribute success to skill rather than the invisible hand of chance.
This fragility is compounded by observation bias. We study the visible winners, assuming their paths are repeatable, while the invisible multitudes, statistically identical but unsuccessful, remain unobserved.
To imitate success is often to emulate a statistical anomaly.
Consider finance, a trader may achieve a string of wins through luck and attribute it to insight. The next trade, chosen with the same confidence, leads to ruin. Yet the mind interprets the outcome retroactively, integrating it into a coherent story, obscuring the role of randomness.
The same occurs in entrepreneurship, art, and science. Intelligence and effort matter, but only within the context of variance, and the average mind is ill-equipped to internalize this probabilistic reality without being seduced by illusion.
Even memory is deceptive. People remember successes and ignore failures, pinning down (even harder) the illusion that effort is proportional to outcome.
The cumulative effect is a subtle, pervasive misestimation of reality: a quiet, constant reinforcement of mediocrity under the guise of competence.
The Erosion of Energy and Will
Time, optionality, and cognition are not merely theoretical constraints; they intersect with the physical reality of human fragility.
Energy decays, motivation falters, attention frays. Life, in its ordinary form, is a constant maintenance of the self. Be it work, health, social obligations, or unforeseen crises. Each day exacts a toll on the resources required to attempt exceptional outcomes.
Most people fail not spectacularly, but quietly, through attrition. They continue, but not toward greatness; they continue toward survival. Persistence is mistaken for progress, and repetition is mistaken for mastery.
The body and mind, finite and vulnerable, impose natural ceilings. Even the most capable are subject to entropy, and while rare individuals channel energy into systems that amplify effort, the majority exhaust themselves on tasks with linearly diminishing returns.
The world rewards not merely effort but the preservation of optionality, the endurance of volatility, the capacity to absorb ruin without collapse.
Maintaining this capacity requires foresight, luck, and structural advantage, all of which are scarce. Those who do not possess it will find themselves slowly stripped of opportunity, momentum, and the very desire to pursue.
Consider the innumerable entrepreneurs who work tirelessly, innovating, creating, and learning, yet eventually bow to the weight of fatigue, obligation, or disappointment.
The erosion of energy and will is a silent, cumulative, and irreversible process. It is the invisible tax on ambition that few acknowledge and fewer overcome.
The Arithmetic of Systems
Finally, the world rewards systems, not souls. The rare succeed because they plug themselves into or create systems that scale output beyond the limits of their own effort.
The average person is bound by linearity. One life, One mind, One body. The multiplicative returns of systems, networks, algorithms, capital, and teams cannot be accessed without prior signals, relationships, or capital.
These are precisely the elements the average person lacks, and attempting to bypass them is often equivalent to fighting gravity.
Moreover, systems are designed to extract rather than distribute. Platforms capture attention, markets skim upside, networks consolidate power.
Individual effort is absorbed into larger flows, leaving only minimal residuals. Even extraordinary personal skill is often neutralized by systemic dynamics: timing, coordination, competition, and structural scarcity.
The arithmetic is absolute. To compete at the level that matters requires early entry, scale, or leverage.
Without these, effort is linear, returns are flat, and the probability of meaningful success approaches zero.
Every law of compounding advantage, every property of optionality, every cognitive limitation, every entropy of energy converges in this single arithmetic:
The average person is statistically invisible to the systems that distribute outsized rewards.
The Quiet Realization
If you have followed me thus far, you can now see that impossibility is not an accident or a moral judgment. It is the natural outcome of structure, of probability, of finite resources intersecting with infinite possibility.
The reasons are many, interconnected, and cumulative. Distribution, time, cognition, energy, and system dynamics all align to make the average trajectory one of mediocrity.
Yet, there is no tragedy here, only recognition.
To know this is to see the architecture of reality without illusion, to recognize the arithmetic beneath ambition.
There is no moral imperative to overcome the odds; the odds simply are.
The rare few who escape do so not by merit alone, but by chance, leverage, optionality, and often, randomness that favors the prepared but not the average.
Thus, the lesson, if it can be called that, is not actionable; it is contemplative.
The arithmetic of the ordinary is silent, indifferent, and precise.
It does not care whether you know it, whether you try, or whether you despair. It merely exists, and in knowing it, you are free to see the world as it is.
There is no call to action, no conclusion, no balm for the ego. Only clarity.