I finished up reading Going Inifinite a week ago and there’s an idea in it I still can’t get out of my head.
The back-story goes like this. Sam Friedman-Banks had an interview at a high-frequency trading firm, and his approach to one interview game won him the job, then made him one of their most successful traders.
Here’s the game:
You have a stack of coins, and some of them are biased. Some are 55/45 a smaller number are 60/40, and a small number are 65/35. You don’t know the numbers of each.
The game is to win as may coin tosses as possible.
Now there’s a few ways to win, but Sam’s strategy was simple.
Find one coin with an edge and then work on flipping it as fast as possible.
There’s such a high time cost to finding the perfect coin that by the time you find it, you’ll never catch up with Sam’s strategy.
I can’t get this idea out of my head because it’s so much like life. Too many of us spend our time looking for the perfect coin when we should be flipping one where we have even a slight edge.
I found an edge in email.
My mum is an English teacher so I was a voracious reader as a kind and I write OK. My dad worked in computing just as home computers became affordable, so I was comfortable with computers in a way most writers weren’t for a long time.
I flipped the email coin a lot, and for a long time. I sent my first commercial email in 1995 and I’ve probabaly sent over a billon emails since then.
Often it feels like I can see a coin that’s working better.
Social media looks like a coin worth flipping, but the people who are good at it got good by doing what I did with emails. By flipping their coin for years.
Email does need a second coin. It needs a traffic source to fill the list, so I went for the coin I could flip fastest in the traffic world – paid ads.
That might not be the right coin for you though.
All I want to know today is, how many coins are you trying to flip at once, and are you giving yourself enough flips every day to win every day?
