Yesterday, I explored the idea of the Person Decathlon (PD) – a concept first written about by my coach Jon Waldron. The idea is to create your own ten-event decathlon which is so specifically catered to you that out of the world’s 7-billion, you’ll be the only (wo)man in contention.
When I started thinking about my own PD events, I did some math. I wanted to see if my 10 events really would narrow down to just me. The thing is – I actually had to alter my narrative a bit because I found that I was reducing the world’s population down to zero way too quickly. Originally, I had listed Labview coding as event #5, but it turns out that there are only about half-a-million Labview users in the world (or 0.007% of the world population). Using my statistical method, this essentially ended my 10-events at event #5, so I decided to push it towards the end to keep things interesting.
So, that got me wondering as to what is the best way to narrow down the world population to just you in ten events? I explored two methods.
Method 1: The Jack of All Trades
The first route I decided to look at was how good you’d have to be at each event, assuming you’re equally good at all ten. Some quick math gives us this equation:
Where R is the ratio we’re trying to figure out (i.e. – above what percentage of the population do you have to score in each event). Well, assuming a world population of 7,000,000,000 this simplifies down easily enough to give us an answer of R = 0.1.
What does this mean? It means that if you are equally good at all ten of your events, relative to the world’s population, you need to place at least in the 90th percentile (or the top 10%) in each event.
Now, that might sound hard when you think about 90th percentile on your GRE or SAT, but the truth is there’re a LOT of things in which people can score in the top 10% of the world population just due to participation. Do you speak Spanish? Only 7% of the world does, so with anything Spanish related, there’s a straight-shot to the top-10%. Have you ever FINISHED a marathon (regardless of time)? Less than 10% of the world has even started a marathon, so there’s your event #2.
With the Jack-Of-All-Trades plan, you don’t have to be at the very top of any skill, but you simply need to think of ten unique skills that don’t have too much overlap.
NOTE: All of this math is based on the extremely faulty assumption that your events don’t have overlap. If you pick ten events that are too closely related (like all related to Spanish language), then you’re gonna have a bad day.
Method 2: The Star
The second method I looked at was for someone who was really good at one event. Not the best in the world, but in the top hundred to a few thousand.
If you have one super strong event – say you’re a chess grand-master or a top-100 tennis player – how good do you have to be at your other events? Or, conversely, how lax can you let your standards be for your other nine events.
Well, a bit more math from the above equation led us to the function,
Where pop is the population of people that are better than you at your top event (so, 100, if you’re a top-100 tennis player) and Ratio is the average percentage of the world population you’d need to beat for the remaining nine events. When graphed, it looks something like this (note the log-scaled Y-axis):
What we see is that – as we would expect – the better you are at your Star event, the more lax you can be with the rest of your events. Starting at the very top – if you’re in the top 100 in anything in the world, you can be pretty damn lax. You can be in just the top 60% of the population in your other nine events. However, the changes get much smaller as we go up. If you’re in the top 50 in the world, you only gain 4-percentage-points and still need to be in the top 64% (or better than about 1 out of every 3 random people).
But those are pretty small numbers. Unless we start counting extremely specific tasks (say, running from Tufts to my Parents’ home with no map), being in the top 50-100 is super hard. Let’s look at some bigger numbers.
If you’re close to the top 500 (512 to be exact), you can average 50/50 for the rest of your events. That means that for your other 9 events, you only have to beat half of the world. This seems pretty easy. Let’s keep going.
Top 1000? You only need to average top 46% for the rest of your event (54th percentile). Seems reasonable.
Top 5000? Top 38% (62nd percentile)
Top 20,000?
Top 33% (66th percentile or beating an average of two out of three random people)
Top 2,000,000? Top 20% (80th percentile or beating an average of four out of five randos)
From these, it looks like the Star way is a lot easier because – let’s be honest – it’s not that hard to find an event that you’d score in the top two-million (think weird games, programming languages, unpopular sports, odd skills, etc.)
Conclusion: How short can my PD be?
All of this stemmed from the fact that I had to artificially prolong my decathlon to keep it interesting. But now, I want to look at how short I could really make it and still be the undisputed champion.
In my first event, I decided on a very long race at very high altitude. Based on this event, I estimated that this narrowed our field down to about 5,000 realistic contenders. Now based on the above numbers, I could just average in the 68th percentile for the rest of my nine events. Or, I could try to find a few other unique events that would bring us down to statistical zero earlier.
My most unique event after that is probably Labview coding, which was estimated at 0.007% of the population. This already brings our 5000 elite runners down to 0.35 fractional running-engineers. But here, we’re dealing with small numbers, so let’s assume we need at least one more event. I’m going to go with haggling (in Spanish). Because my first event probably has a bias against Spanish-speakers (given that a lot of those 5000 will be from East Africa), I’m going to assume that this pushes me over the edge. My three-event PD: high-altitude long-distance running, Labview coding, and Spanish haggling.
Epilogue – A Two Event PD?
Finally, I realize that if you get specific enough, most people could come up with a two-event PD. For me,
- Operating the Tufts High Temperature Induction Reactor
- A footrace longer than 1 mile (to make sure Brad doesn’t beat me in a 200)
But, seeing that there are probably less than a dozen people who even know what event #1 is, we’ll add the rule that there needs to be a minimum population of a few hundred to keep it interesting!
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