In life, you always have two choices: to think like a casino mogul or like the chump gambler dropping cash in a slot machine. One lives in a penthouse with a butler, the other in a rented apartment with a landlord who doesn’t fix leaky toilets.
Casinos make billions of dollars by mastering one idea: Uncertain Certainty.
Here’s the micro-view (the lie): Your friend Billy goes to Vegas, hits a lucky streak, and walks away with $2,000 playing dollar slots. He brags on Facebook, thinks he’s a genius, and “beat the system.” But you know better.
Billy’s win is the Uncertainty of Certainty.
Here’s the macro-view (the truth): While Billy’s Facebook post gets many likes, you didn’t hear about the nine other Billys who crawled home with empty pockets and a nasty hangover. They didn’t post on Facebook. Billy’s “win” is just a short-term statistical blip, and survivor’s bias makes it seem more obvious than it really is.
The casino’s billions in profit? That certainty is the expected value. The casino isn’t gambling; it bets on mathematical truths and the certainty found within expected value. The macro truth crushes the micro lie.
If you read a lot of my books, you know I’m always preaching about expected value and how it is the key to upside asymmetry. Upside asymmetry explodes wealth and is the key to your best life.
There is disorder in single events.
There is order in many events.
And order eventually wins.
Here’s why this matters in decision-making.
In 2021, I co-founded a bootstrapped SaaS company. If you’ve read anything I’ve ever written, you’ll know I’m famously anti-partnership. Basically, they’re marriages without the fun or the foreplay. But I did it anyway.
Why?
Because I make decisions like a casino and profit like one. Namely, the expected value of the business venture was too good to ignore.
Three years later, it crashed hard. Not the idea, the teamwork. We bickered over strategy, execution, even button colors, like two chefs arguing over salt. His fault? Mine? Nope, we just didn’t click and we decided to part ways.
The good news? We ended up selling that company for a nice sum of money that would change most people’s lives. It didn’t change mine, but that is not the point.
Any regrets? Heck no. The upside was yacht in Ibiza wild. Hitting decent could have leveled up generations. In other words, the Expected Value was casino like—legendary. That is why I swung, and I would swing again. Expected value made the decision a no brainer, even in hindsight.
A few coin tosses? Unpredictable. You might get 7 heads in 10 flips. That is the gambler’s perspective. Flip that same coin a million times? The result becomes predictable. You land near fifty percent every time. That is the casino’s perspective.
The gambler plays the 10 flip game while the casino plays the million flip game. Which decision are you making? This same Uncertain Certainty exists in our daily decisions.
Expected value functions as the house edge and it can be yours.
My Uncle Lester smoked a pack a day, drank a fifth of whiskey, and lived until he was 80!
Lester is the uncertainty. He is the statistical outlier. He is Billy winning at slots.
What you don’t see are the nine other Lesters who tried the same strategy and were dead from cirrhosis or lung cancer by 50. Their gamble was a catastrophic loss.
Want to be a better decision-maker and win the spoils of an amazing life?
Think like the casino. Play the long game of certainty. Play positive expected value.
Want to struggle, ruin your life, and live on what ifs? Think like a gambler and hope for uncertainty.
Regular drinking, smoking, speeding, riding motorcycles in a sea of distracted morons, taking stupid downside risks… that is gambling on the wrong side of uncertainty.
“I won’t get caught this time.”
“Lester smoked until his last breath.”
“It won’t happen to me.”
“I’m the exception.”
LOL.
There is disorder in single events.
There is order in many events.
Order eventually wins.
Stop being a gambler. Start being the house. Do not play the game, sell the game.
MJ DeMarco, Author, Entrepreneur
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