The Success Rates of Michael Jordan, Pablo Picasso & Serena Williams
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Everyone worships patience, but this Instagram carousel quietly exposes the real engine behind success: sheer volume of attempts. The slides show legends like Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Dolly Parton, and James Dyson with tiny pie-slices of wins sitting inside massive circles of tries. Their “failure” pies are huge, their success rates look embarrassingly low—and that’s exactly the point.
How to multiply your attempts today
Instead of guarding one “perfect” project, steal this math. Publish 10 drafts instead of polishing one. Launch small offers monthly instead of waiting for the big bang. Treat every email, pitch, or product like another tick on your attempts counter. Your job isn’t to predict which shot will land; it’s to make so many shots that the tiny success slice finally shows up in your own pie chart.
What these success pies really say
- Jordan’s 24,537 shots and Serena’s 81 tournaments prove greatness comes from reps, not perfect timing.
- Picasso, Sinatra, and Dolly wrote thousands of pieces so a small slice could become iconic hits.
- Dyson’s 5,127 prototypes show that for breakthrough ideas, you don’t need better patience—you need more tries.
- When you zoom out, the only pattern is quantity: more attempts automatically multiply your lucky breaks.
Real-world quantity-over-patience playbook
Spotify ships constant product experiments so a few winning features can dramatically improve user engagement.
HubSpot publishes a high volume of blogs, templates, and tools so a minority of hits drive the bulk of their inbound leads.
Basecamp launches small, iterative software improvements so learning from many micro-launches compounds into durable products.
Creative Variations
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