From Trader to Dad: Everything I Learned About a Sense of Probability
Trading taught me to live with uncertainty. I'm more and more convinced it's the ability kids should get earliest — and are taught least.
During my years as a trader, I dealt with one thing every single day: uncertainty.
Not "right or wrong," but "this has a 60% chance — how should I size my bet." That way of thinking changed how I see the world — and it changed what I want to give my child.
School barely teaches a sense of probability
We teach kids that 1+1=2, we teach the standard answer, we teach that "what's right is right." But the real world has almost no standard answers. The real world is all probability:
- Will it rain today?
- Is this decision worth the risk?
- I lost once — was the strategy wrong, or was I just unlucky?
A person without a sense of probability attributes every failure to "I'm not good enough," rather than "the odds didn't fall my way this time." That's a very expensive cognitive gap.
A game is the safest sandbox for practicing probability
Losing a round in a game costs almost nothing. But what the child lives through in that round is real:
- Betting, taking on risk, facing luck.
- Telling apart "I made a bad decision" from "I just didn't hit it."
- And after losing, still wanting one more round — which is itself the ability to make peace with uncertainty.
That's why a sense of probability and risk is an explicit branch on the momomori ability tree. I haven't started that product yet, but I already know it will arrive in the form of a game.
Because some abilities can't be lectured into a child. They can only be played in.