A Plan for Fighting Chance

There are a host of grants & fellowships out there to help emerging talent. A common approach is to get ambitious, high-agency individuals to apply and pick the most promising applicants to fund.

These programs play a crucial role in connecting capital with the rising stars who need it. But they're usually just scoped to give recipients money and specialized training. They don't take a broader look at what might be blocking talent from being expressed. Fighting Chance plans to activate hidden outliers by taking a more holistic approach that targets both the outlier and the community around them.

A. Outlier

The social validation, money & support from grant programs encourage recipients to chase bigger dreams. But the bottleneck keeping outliers from being activated is rarely that their aspirations aren't high enough. A common issue is that their thinking is muddled, often by social contagion. Encouraging outliers to dream bigger is easy. Encouraging them to be appropriately critical of themselves is hard. Saying "raise your aspirations" is generally good for the wider population, but amongst those who already have real ambitions, "you should dream even bigger" can actually be counter-productive, like piling on more weight when the form needs to be fixed first.

It's more critical to first dig into the nitty gritty details of the outlier's assumptions about the world and themselves. Fighting Chance will include:

1. A library of posts about the outlier's headset, the nuances of attention, edge-domain fit & other topics to get the outlier unmuddled
2. One-on-one mirror sessions that let an outlier see an image of themself at a slightly different angle, one that they hadn't seen before
3. Connecting the outlier to a broader network of others

B. Community

Outliers need the right conditions to flourish. A village of people & opportunities must come together to create this environment. The community, or at least a few key individuals around the outlier need to see why the outlier is worth fighting for. Fighting Chance will provide the context for them to appreciate the tyranny of alternate histories and how resources for outliers can be misallocated. We'll activate the community by showing them how there might be a Ramanujan among them who can't become Ramanujan without the right supporting context.

C. Funding

Fighting Chance will provide the initial funding needed to set up the conditions that activate the outlier and the community around them.