Are You Underestimating Your Chances Of Success?

Are you underestimating your chances of success? Maybe.

Here’s a recent bit of information from Ankesh Kothari

Frank Flynn and Vanessa Lake are social cientists. Here are the details of a couple of esearch studies they conducted:

Experiment #1:

In one study, the participants had to ask strangers to fill out a questionnaire. But before they went out to fulfill their tasks, the participants had to predict: how many strangers would they have to ask before 5 agreed to fill out the questionnaire?

The average estimation was that the participants would have to ask 20 people to get 5 respondents.

But when the participants went on for their tasks, they found that on average, they had to ask just 11 people to get 5 responses! They had underestimated their rate of success by 50%!

Experiment # 2

Frank and Vanessa then took their research one step ahead. And decided to take money into account. They gathered a new set of participants. And gave them a task to ask people to actually donate money to find a cure for leukemia.

Once again before the participants went out, they were asked to predict the percentage of people they would have to approach who would actually donate money. And once again, the participants underestimated their rate of success by nearly half!

What’s more, the participants also underestimated the amount of money each donor would donate on average by 25%!

Action Summary:

* When trying to decide whether to make a request of someone or not, it’s important to realize that you’ll be underestimating the likelihood of hearing Yes. And this underestimation may lead to your not asking at all.

* We humans are poor predictors of our own successes. Don’t hesitate while “asking”.