Anna Karenina principle

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", reads the infamous opening line in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. It reveals a general pattern in life, where an undertaking can fail in a multitude of ways, yet succeed only when everything goes right. This is called the Anna Karenina principle.

Given this asymmetry in outcomes, you could expect most endeavours that follow the Anna Karenina principle to fail. It is simply statistically more likely. But which things follow the principle?

Well, we know that things that follow the Pareto principle don't follow the Anna Karenina principle. If the 20% can contribute 80% of the results, then you can fail in almost everything but still succeed overall. If you cannot identify any factors that have outsized impact on the end result - if the result truly is a sum of everything - then the Anna Karenina principle might apply.

• Getting rich is probably not an Anna Karenina -type endeavor; randomness plays too big a part. But building a product worthy of reverence - it can only happen when everything goes right. So if you aim to just get money, apply the Pareto principle, shoot many shots, see what sticks. But if you aim at the latter, the Anna Karenina principle is the way to go.
• To feel healthy in the short term, Pareto applies: any improvement in sleep, exercise and nutrition will most likely do it. But to feel healthy in your 80s or 90s, that happens only if everything goes right (including having luck on your side).

I think it's really important to distinguish which parts of your life you can 80/20 your way through, and where you really need to obsess over every detail.

• Wikipedia
• Similar observation: Idios kosmos ("The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.").
• Peter Thiel had this take that failure teaches you nothing, because failure is overrepresented in the realm of all possibilities. If it fails one way, it could also have failed 1000 other ways. So you could fail 50 times and still keep on failing. It's much better to learn from success, so maybe one should seek to find success, no matter how small, then scale up (vs very low probability of immediate big success).