Started early-Sept 2026
It’s been a rough 6 weeks on the betting side, straight after a super promising 3 months.
During this rough time I’m reminded about the idea of you only need to be “right” once.
“right” in the sense of “Really right vs others”.
It’s similar to the idea that you only need to get rich once.
Presuming you don’t go then fuck it up.
If you pursuit 5 businesses and 4 fail, or even 50 and 49 fail.
But 1 makes a few million a year or even a single large sum when you sell, you are set…
Presuming you aren’t hyper materialistic or blow it all.
But unlike lottery winners, when founders or business owners make a large sum from a sale, they rarely blow this in the same way.
They can blow it on future businesses, but not on “stuff”.
That’s because they’ve learnt the skills on how to be wealthy in 90% of cases.
But back to sport land.
Currently this feels the same on the sports side.
We get traction on one sport, one league
Something else breaks.
You fix that…
Another sport goes through a bad run.
And on and on.
The thought of “once everything is fully fixed”….
Then the season ends and it’s another 6 months wait till that sport starts up again.
Incredibly frustrating.
Zoom Out
But zooming out helps.
"You only need to be REALLY right once” concept does help.
Even if it takes you a decade to “get there”, whatever “there” definition is for you personally, you still only need to “make it” once.
“Make it” or “get there” can be however you define it, but it’s true not just in business or financial projects but also in relationships or even health in a lot of cases.
If it takes you 10 years to find the right person but after this you are set, that’s a small price to pay to be “really right”.
Even in health, 10 years to learn/build the foundation both physically, mentally, in the gym, in the kitchen and so on, to increase your health-span by 30+ years? - Again in comparison 10 years vs EVER is not a bad deal.
Keeping muscle, staying lean, staying healthy is easier than building muscle, getting lean or getting healthy again.
Espically when you are older.
Over the past decade I’ve had some nasty business failures, and even the “successes” didn’t quite come out as expected, whether that’s not getting paid for a business sale or moving the money from a profitable project to an unprofitable one.
But similar to the post last week about going all-in at certain times, I think there’s something to this concept of aiming for being really right - if that once solves decades of other issues it doesn’t matter if it was luck or not if you have 50 mil in the bank.
This isn’t the sell your assets and put £50k on #7 in roulette once a year in Vegas because if it wins you have 1.8mil or so…. which you can probably live off.
That’s obviously just dumb.
Instead I’m on about taking very calculated but very aggressive swings in certain circumstances.
Such as timing a business decision.
Really pushing an edge when you have it.
Removing distractions for these periods or bouts of time when you can find out if you are right or not.
We’re not meant to work 35 hours a week forever.
Sprint then rest instead.
Be Really-Right Once.
If it turns out after all this time, all this work that the only thing I got “truly right” from all the businesses and the dozens of sporting leagues and near decade I’ve worked on sports modelling is 1 singular sport….
I’d be extremely disappointed.
Unless it was so right that it didn’t matter….
All hockey leagues = nothing, rugby, rugby league, AFL all sucked….
But if you were really-right…
Say it was a 20% ROI cricket model.
With 150 bets a year.
That’s 30 units / year.
Sounds not great.
When my goal is 30/month that seems very very poor.
Until you realise that most of those games you can get down £100,000+
So suddenly £3 Mil a year is possible…
Suddenly less disappointed now.
This is why I prefer going super deep on a subject now.
AI / LLMs are already better than 90% of people at 90% of things.
And that will only grow to being better than 99% of people at 99% of things in the next few months or years.
But the 1% of 1% will never really be able to be replicated, because that edge won’t be public in a lot of cases and by definition AI has to train on-something. It has to learn and in most cases it’s not commercially viable for AI companies to train their models on these fringe industry specific elements.
So as a result learning and converging skills that you’ve learnt from different areas of life, experience using AI to leverage that edge or unique innovative skillset, is the key edge you can have.
This is also known as a power law or non-linear result distribution.
It’s similar to the Pareto principal but it’s a far more dramatic power law than the 80/20 rule.
Researching this idea, the most similar example was “The Superstar Effect” - from economist Sherwin Rosen’s 1981 paper.
The main point was small differentials in quality or performance (or talent) when compounded produce massive differentials in results.
This is obvious in trading / business - someone who makes 10% a year in the market versus someone who makes 15% might not sound like a massive difference but a.) over 20 years equates to results of 16.4x returns for the 15% guy and 6.7x returns for the 10% guy. 2.4x the money on just a 5 percentage points difference.
But what makes this more dramatic than an extra 100k across 20 years is that all the additional returns/rewards go to this better player of that specific game.
Think about sports.
The best example is Athletics.
Usain Bolt is the fastest man.
As a result he earned millions in sponsorships, endorsements and essentially “additional returns and rewards”.
For?
For being 0.2 seconds faster than the next guy (who you have never heard of) in 2008.
Outside of a track, these are negligible amounts.
But as a result you’ve never heard of Richard Thompson or Walter Dix…
Who seem like nice guys but there’s a difference between 1st and 2nd, and it’s not 0.2seconds or 1 point or 1cm, it’s everything.
It’s massively clear in tennis as well.
The person currently rated 1st in the world is Jannik Sinner.
He’s 25 years old - with tournament earnings (not sponsorships) of: $69,478,174.
The person ranked 100th currently as of time of writing this, is someone called: Toby Samuel.
Who you’ve never fucking heard of.
He’s 24, so a similar age, UK guy, who’s earnings are: $648,750.
Which sounds like alot until you factor in travel, hotels, coaching, rehab, equipment and on and on.
It’s not like Sinner is 100 times better than Samuel, but he gets paid as though he is because of this power law.
And for reference the player ranked 1,000th in the world - which changes daily is around $30,000-50,000 (lifetime).
I also wanted to check how “much better” someone like Sinner is vs the 100th ranked player, but turns out Samuel and Sinner have never played, so instead I took the 99th ranked player currently, a French dude called “Terence Atmane”. He’s played Sinner twice and unsurprisingly lost twice, however in one game he won a set (in a best of 3) and in another lost 7-6, 6-2. On averaging about 5-6% more points (54% to 46%).
So all that to say, you only need to be 6-8% better to receive 100x the results.
Niche Down
Although we’re not talking breaking sprinting records or winning grand slams, I do think there’s something to niching down and becoming the best in a very narrow channel, niche or vertical before working back up and broadening.
I saw this very clearly in my old industry (SEO).
SEO is a subsection of marketing —> Digital Marketing —> Search Marketing —> SEO.
But you can go more niche.
SEO —> Amazon SEO.
Or SEO —> Link Building —> Certain type of link building.
In almost every case I personally ran into, the “best” people in the industry were very sharp on one or two very niche elements.
Anyone who said they were a “digital marketer” were usually broke and didn’t know the specifics of what worked in each vertical because they were too wide.
It’s the same in sports and other businesses.
If you ONLY sell to one hyper niche vertical, you WILL be the best solution for that client, because by definition you have niched down (think digital marketer vs Amazon SEO specialist for UK supplement brands).
If you had a UK supplement brand, who’s more likely to be useful for your business?
Be Really Right Once.
Being really right can be timing related too.
Timing an industry when new technology is released, AI, Internet, distribution networks etc.
This is why I believe timing effort with opportunity is key.
But, preparation for that opportunity is essential too, this is where get rich quick vs easy get’s misaligned.
Easy = scam.
Quick = Do you already have the necessary skillset when the opportunity arises?
Chances are no, unless you’ve prepared for that situation.
Cheers.
Tom.