Serial Entrepreneur and host of one of Europe's top business podcasts, Secret Leaders with over 50M downloads & angel investor in 85+ startups - here to share stories and studies breaking down the science of success - turning it from probability to predictability.
The Science Of Success (Really).
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The Science Of Success (Really). Read time: 6 minutes Hey, welcome back. Last week, we talked about why you need to increase your surface area to capture luck. You can read that (and all past issues, here) Today, I'm going to dive deep into The Science Of Success. I've been writing this newsletter for years. It's called The Science of Success. And I realised the other day that I've never actually written about the science of success. The literal, researched, studied, peer-reviewed science of what makes people succeed. So today I'm going to fix that. And I'm going to be honest: some of this is going to be uncomfortable to read. There Are Two Types Of Work Every task you do in a day falls into one of two categories. Once you see this, you can't unsee it. The first type is structural work. This is work where the outcome is predictable. You follow a process, you get a result. Answering emails. Filling in spreadsheets. Completing a checklist. Following a recipe. Building a deck someone asked for. The instructions exist, the path is clear, and if you do the steps, the thing gets done. The second type is variance work. This is work where the outcome is unknown. You don't know if it will work. You don't know how people will respond. You don't know if you'll be rejected, ignored, or laughed at. Cold calling a prospect. Pitching an investor. Asking someone you admire to mentor you. Launching something before it's ready. Telling your crush you like them. Posting something online that might get zero engagement. Structural work feels productive. Variance work feels terrifying. And that's why most people spend 90% of their day on the first type and avoid the second type entirely. The Research Is Clear On This A Harvard Business School study surveyed 1,300 HBS graduates and identified 11 factors that distinguish successful founders from everyone else. Five showed statistically significant differences. The biggest one? Comfort with uncertainty. Founders scored dramatically higher than non-founders on their ability to operate in situations where the outcome is unknown. And they scored significantly lower on preference for established structure. Meaning they were less interested in environments where the rules are clear and the process is defined. Read that again. The people who succeed most are the ones who are least comfortable in predictable environments and most comfortable in unpredictable ones. They gravitate toward variance work. Everyone else hides from it. Why You're Busy All Day And Nothing Changes You know this feeling. You worked from 8am to 7pm. You were "on" the whole time. You answered every email, attended every meeting, cleared your to-do list. You go to bed exhausted and feeling like you earned it. But nothing actually moved. Your business is in the same place it was last month. Your career hasn't shifted. Your income hasn't changed. Your opportunities look identical. That's because you spent the entire day on structural work. The safe stuff. The predictable stuff. The stuff that makes you feel busy without ever requiring you to risk anything. The cold email you should have sent to that potential client? You'll do it tomorrow. The investor you need to approach? You're still "refining the deck." The content you want to post? You're waiting until you have something really good. The price increase your business needs? You'll think about it next quarter. All of those are variance work. All of them involve uncertainty. All of them carry the possibility of rejection. And all of them are the only things that would actually change your situation. Cold Calling Has A 2% Success Rate. That's The Point. Research on cold calling shows it has roughly a 2% success rate. Most people hear that and think "why would anyone bother?" The people who succeed hear that and think "98% of the people I'm competing with won't even pick up the phone." Jia Jiang, a rejection researcher, spent 100 days deliberately seeking rejection to study what happens. His research found that we massively overestimate both the likelihood and the negative impact of rejection. The thing you're afraid of is almost never as bad as you've built it up to be in your head. And the people who push through that fear consistently outperform the people who don't, because the field is so empty. Mark Cuban built his first company, MicroSolutions, through relentless cold calling. Because he was willing to do the variance work that everyone else avoided. That pattern shows up everywhere. The person who gets the job is often the one who followed up when everyone else assumed silence meant no. The founder who raises money is often the one who pitched 50 investors while everyone else stopped at 10. The person who builds the audience is the one who posted 200 times while everyone else quit after 20. Variance work is a numbers game where most players forfeit before the first round. Why Your Brain Fights You On This Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that fear of rejection is hardwired into our brains as a survival mechanism. In evolutionary terms, being rejected by the group could literally kill you. So your brain treats every cold email, every pitch, every bold ask as a potential threat to your survival. That's why structural work feels so good. Your brain rewards you for completing predictable tasks because predictability means safety. Every email answered, every meeting attended, every checkbox ticked sends a small signal to your nervous system that says "you're safe." Variance work sends the opposite signal. Uncertainty feels dangerous. Your brain will generate every possible excuse to keep you in the safe zone. You need more preparation. The timing isn't right. You should wait until you're more experienced. All of it is your survival wiring trying to keep you away from the thing that would actually change your life. I Lived This When Joel and I were starting Heights, the structural work was endless. We could have spent years perfecting the formula, redesigning the website, tweaking the branding, optimising the email flows. All productive. All safe. All completely useless without customers. The variance work was picking up the phone and calling retailers. Sending cold emails to press. Asking people with audiences to try our product and share their experience. Pitching investors who had no reason to care about two tech founders entering the supplement space. Every single breakthrough at Heights came from variance work. Every retailer, every press feature, every investor, every partnership. The structural work kept the lights on. The variance work built the company. How To Shift Your Ratio You don't need to abandon structural work. The emails still need answering. The operations still need running. But you need to be honest about the ratio. Look at your calendar from last week. How many hours did you spend on tasks with a known outcome? And how many hours did you spend on tasks where rejection, failure, or uncertainty was a real possibility? If the answer is 95/5, you've found the reason things aren't moving. Block one hour per day for variance work. Put it in your calendar. Protect it the way you protect your meetings. Use that hour for the asks, the pitches, the outreach, the launches, the conversations you've been putting off. Start with the smallest version. One cold email. One DM to someone you admire. One post you've been sitting on. One price conversation with a client. You don't need to overhaul your life. You just need to do one uncomfortable thing per day that has an uncertain outcome. The 2% success rate only matters if you're in the 2% who actually tried. To doing the scary stuff, Dan P.S. Right now, think of the one thing you've been avoiding because you don't know how it'll land. Send it today. The worst that happens is silence. The best that happens changes everything. And either way, you just did something 98% of people won't. |
Dan Murray
Serial Entrepreneur and host of one of Europe's top business podcasts, Secret Leaders with over 50M downloads & angel investor in 85+ startups - here to share stories and studies breaking down the science of success - turning it from probability to predictability.
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