Why 60 per cent is often an excellent result in life

Today I want to share a magic number, a target that you should aim for: 60 per cent.

School plants strong ideas about what a winning grade is in all of us. The way we get marked tells us that 80 and 90 per cent are the great numbers, the ones that give you ‘A’ grades. Those numbers get you the top certificates and accolades, and open the real doors for you. 60 per cent? What is that, a ‘C’? You can do better, kid. Aim higher.

The idea that gets embedded in our psyches is that we must get most things right, most of the time. If you don’t get the higher grades, you’ll worry everyone: your teachers, your parents, hell, even the neighbours will rock up to shake their heads at you. That pressure tends to follow you into adulthood. We internalise the notion that life, work, success—it all hangs on achieving some version of perfection, or close to it.

That may be laudable and doable in school life, but I’m here to tell you that when you hit the dusty streets of reality, 60 per cent is a good number. No, I’m not losing my mind. Hear me out.

In real life, a 60 per cent success rate could make you extraordinarily successful. You don’t need to get it right every time; you just need to be right more often than you are wrong. You don’t need to knock it out of the park with every swing; no one can do that consistently and over a long period. You just need to win more often than you lose.

In The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel told us that tails drive everything. That means that in many aspects of our lives—particularly business, investing, and finance—it’s OK to be wrong a lot of the time. If you’re a good investor, you’ll have plenty of bad years and lots of just OK ones. A top business leader might see nearly half of their strategies or product ideas actually work out. Peter Lynch, regarded as one of the best investors of our time, told Housel: “If you’re terrific in this business, you’re right six times out of ten.”

An important caveat: this does not apply to everything! A surgeon should not aim to get only half their operations right; a pilot should not land safely just 60 per cent of the time; a restaurant chef can’t be aiming to produce excellent dishes only some of the time. Those standards in those professions will get you fired, with catastrophes in your train, very quickly.

The point is more subtle. In many of the endeavours of life, the degree of uncertainty and the power of exogenous variables is so high, that winning most of the time is actually enough. In those activities, success isn’t like a school exam. What matters is your overall batting average over a long period. If 60 per cent of your choices work out, you can still be winning. Even Warren Buffet pointed out that the majority of his wealth comes from just a handful of good bets. The trick is to make much more money from the good investments than you lose from the bad ones.

In business, the best executives aren’t the ones never failing. They’re the ones learning the most from their failures. They shoulder them, figure out what caused them, adjust course, and keep moving forward. They don’t chase perfection; they chase progress. They stay in the game, and they play long.

Roger Federer gave a commencement address at Dartmouth College. The retired tennis legend pointed out that while he won almost 80 per cent of the singles matches he played in his career, he only won 54 per cent of the total points in the matches—a little more than half! He said this: “When you lose every second point, you learn not to dwell on every shot…it’s only a point.” He asked all of us to put every failed point behind us, and commit fully to the next one. We don’t have to doubt ourselves or feel sorry for ourselves; we just have to keep learning and keep playing.

In investing, in forecasting, in business, and in much of life, the key is to stay in the game. You can’t do that if you demand perfection from yourself. You can’t do that if every small mistake feels like a catastrophe. Instead, we must all learn to play the long game—to understand that 60% success means we’re winning the inherently difficult and uncertain game of life.

In my book Up & Ahead, I share a life lesson from two economists—John Kay and Mervyn King—who are not trapped in academic frameworks, but instead look at life in full knowledge of all its imperfections. They point out that most regular people don’t try to optimize anything—they just try to cope! But crucially, they try to get better. They don’t aim for the highest peaks; they don’t even know that they exist, or where they are. They just keep trying to get to a place that’s higher than where they are now.

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