Fiction monologue: Dr. Bat on 10 percent of things working

Dr. Bat wrote an email to his friends:

"Hello all!

"I had some thoughts. I have noticed an interesting pattern from tracking some personal data. I have found that about 10 percent of the resumes I send out get responses. I notice about 10 percent of requests for people to reconsider something important to me lead to positive outcomes. I have noticed that often times when I break a record on some measure of performance, it is often around 10 times the average performance (say if I wrote one page on average a day, my record would be something like 10 pages).

"I wonder how true it is to say that 10 percent of your ideas will work, or will be accepted, and it's hard or impossible to tell which ones these ideas are. Or if you average a certain output, your best output would be 10 times that. If this is true, you might crank out lots of output--resume letters, requests in email, request for dates, whatever--on the idea that you'll get a bite on 10 percent of them.

"If you want to be a lady's man, ask out 1000 women, 100 of whom will give you the time of day, 10 of whom will do more than that. Figure out how to ask women out easily and more or less in bulk. Stand at a corner and say something like, 'Hey, wanna go out?' in machine-gun fashion to any reasonably attractive woman who walks by.

"Obviously I don't quite know how this rule might work, but it's just something I noticed in my data collecting. I feel like I might have read someone make a similar point but I can't quite remember. I recall Perry Marshall talking about something like this, regarding the 80/20 rule, but I can't recall the point and think it might have been a bit different.

"Anyway, here are a couple of thoughts that were floating through my head recently. I don't know if they are true or not, but they sound cool:

"Creativity or control--pick one.

"I'm rarely master of a situation. I'm rarely a slave to a situation too.

"OK, signing off!

"Dr. Bat

"PS: It occurs to me my musings on 10 percent of things seeming to work might be another way of stating Sturgeon's Law--it's not clear to me but things are close enough to give a nod to the law I suppose."