When people talk about success, they often speak in terms of passion, persistence, or purpose. But what if the real key to achieving your goals could be explained in numbers?
Kyle Austin Young believes it can. The author of Success Is a Numbers Game: Achieve Bigger Goals by Changing the Odds argues that probability, not positivity, is the most overlooked driver of achievement. His work blends behavioral science with practical strategy—offering a refreshing counterpoint to the culture of “just believe in yourself.”
Young believes the biggest mistake people make in assessing chances is mathematical, not motivational.
“The most common mistake people make when assessing their odds is averaging,” Young says. “Let’s say you’re hoping to run a marathon, and your running coach says, to be successful, you must stick to her training routine, nutrition plan, and sleep schedule. In your gut, you feel good about your ability to follow these three guidelines. You’d say there’s a 70% chance for each of them. Your odds of being ready on race day are pretty good, right? Actually, you have a 34% chance of accomplishing this goal.”
Humans, Young explains, are natural overestimators.
“Humans tend to overestimate their odds of success because they assume if each prerequisite step appears likely to happen, they’re primed for a good outcome. In reality, when you need a list of things to go right, you must multiply the individual odds together.”
The result, he says, is that “you’ll often find your initial outlook is much worse than you expected. The good news is, we don’t have to settle for the odds we’re dealt. We can change them.”
So how do we do that?
“Identify the bad outcome you feel is most likely to happen,” Young says. “This is the biggest threat to your success. Finding creative ways to derisk it is an easy lever you can pull to quickly improve your odds.”
That theme—derisking success—runs through his entire framework. Instead of trying to pump up optimism, he suggests systematically reducing the probability of failure.
“A ‘good’ decision made with bad information is primed for a bad outcome,” he explains. “When making data-driven decisions, it’s crucial to ensure we’re working with good data and using it in a relevant context.”
But numbers alone aren’t enough. When asked about intuition, Young offers a nuanced view:
“This depends, in large part, on the depth of your experience. Sometimes ‘intuition’ is just thinly veiled greed, hope, or anxiety. In other cases (more commonly among experts) intuition is a case of the subconscious reaching an important conclusion before the conscious mind has the ability to articulate the reasoning behind it.”
His rule of thumb? “Typically, it’s wise for beginners to trust numbers, whereas true experts might occasionally notice things the numbers failed to take into account.”
Failure, Young insists, is another misunderstood variable in the success equation.
“One way is to recognize that the progress made in pursuit of an unsuccessful goal can be repurposed with a different ending in mind,” he said, citing the early creators of YouTube — who began with a dating site idea that flopped before pivoting to something world-changing. “Rather than throw the failed idea away, the friends decided to pivot, allowing users to leverage the technology to upload videos of just about anything. They later sold their website (now known as YouTube) for over $1.5 billion.”
Young wants people to start viewing every goal as a probability problem—one that can be improved through deliberate risk reduction.
“You have to recognize that every goal you’re pursuing has two hidden numbers attached to it—a probability of success and a probability of failure,” he says. “Your odds of success can be understood as the odds of each thing that has to go right, multiplied together.”
Young believes leaders can use this mindset to inspire teams.
“Success Diagrams—essentially, a list of everything that has to go right and what might instead go wrong—are incredibly useful tools for collaboration,” he says. “Brainstorming ways to disarm potential bad outcomes and tracking your odds of success over time are both practical ways to increase team buy-in and foster a sense of excitement.”
And when it comes to innovation, Young points out that history’s most creative figures were also some of its most prolific.
“Mozart composed over 600 pieces of music. Beethoven composed over 700. Van Gogh produced a new work of art every 36 hours, on average, for ten years. Ben & Jerry’s developed hundreds of experimental flavors. Edison experimented with over 6,000 filaments. This inglorious, unnuanced approach explains many of history’s most ‘innovative’ careers. It’s a painstaking but reliable way to turn a 1% chance of success into a good outcome.”
The key metric, he says, isn’t productivity for its own sake. It’s measurable progress toward actual success.
What’s the most counterintuitive lessons Young has learned about success?
“The power of ‘thinking negative,’” he says. “In pursuit of big goals, we’re often told to focus on the positive and avoid concerns about what might go wrong. The truth is exactly opposite. Only by brainstorming bad outcomes can we take intentional steps to improve our odds of success.”
His closing advice distills his philosophy to a practical exercise:
“Create a success diagram. Make a list of everything that has to go right in order to achieve the goal you’re chasing. For each thing that needs to go right, imagine what could go wrong. Then, get creative and look for opportunities to intentionally reduce your risk of experiencing these bad potential outcomes. In doing so, you’ll bring those odds over to your side. In a single goal, this might change your outcome. Over the course of many goals, it could change your life.”
Success, in Kyle Austin Young’s world, isn’t about magic, motivation, or mindset—it’s about math. But there’s comfort in that. If success is a numbers game, then every setback, every recalculation, and every experiment gives us another chance to change the odds.