Wayne Gretzky said it. In 1983, while he was with the Edmonton Oilers, the quote appeared on a poster and in a Toronto Star column, and it has been attributed to him ever since. The phrasing “you miss 100 of the shots you don’t take” (often “100 percent of the shots”) captures a real decision principle: actions you never attempt have a success probability of exactly zero, while attempted actions carry a nonzero chance of success and a defined cost of failure. The quote’s endurance says less about hockey than about how people weigh inaction against regret.
Why a zero-probability attempt beats a perfect plan you never start
The mechanism behind the quote is probability compounding, not motivational fluff. Suppose each attempt succeeds with probability p and costs you c (time, money, embarrassment). Skipping the attempt yields a certain outcome of zero. Attempting yields an expected value of p × gain − c. As long as p × gain exceeds c, inaction is the worse bet even when p is small.
Consider concrete ranges. A cold sales email might convert at 1 to 3 percent. A job application to a competitive role might yield an interview 2 to 5 percent of the time. A submitted grant proposal might fund at roughly 10 to 25 percent depending on the agency. None of these pay off on a single attempt, but the expected value of 20 attempts compounds: at 2 percent each, the probability of at least one success across 20 independent tries is about 33 percent. At zero attempts, it is exactly 0 percent.
The deeper mechanism is option value. An attempt generates information — Did the pitch land? Was the proposal competitive? — that a skipped attempt never produces. That feedback improves the next attempt’s probability, so early failures have a second payoff: they reduce uncertainty. This is why organizations that run many small experiments often outperform those that run few large, heavily planned ones.
There is also an asymmetry in how people price failure. Research on omission bias shows people judge harmful actions more harshly than equally harmful omissions, so they default to inaction to avoid blame. The quote is a direct counterweight to that bias.
One plain-language version: zero attempts means zero information and zero payoff, so the floor of not trying is exactly the ceiling of not trying.
The numbers behind attempts, costs, and regret
The quote’s arithmetic is simple, but the costs are not symmetric across domains, and that is where most thin explainers stop.
| Domain | Typical single-attempt success rate | Typical cost per attempt | Why inaction persists |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold outreach (email, calls) | 1–3% | Minutes, mild rejection | Fear of seeming pushy |
| Job applications | 2–5% interview rate | Hours per application | Effort per attempt is high |
| Grant proposals | 10–25% funding rate | Weeks of writing | Sunk-cost dread before starting |
| Startup experiments | 5–20% validated | USD 500–5,000 per test | Fear of public failure |
| Public speaking pitches | Variable, often under 10% | Hours of prep | Reputational risk feels permanent |
The regret literature adds a time dimension. Studies of regretted decisions consistently find that people regret inactions more than actions over long horizons, even though they regret actions more in the short term. The crossover typically appears within months to a few years. In one well-known survey format, respondents asked to name their biggest regrets overwhelmingly cite things they did not do — not things they did.
The counterintuitive detail: the quote is often wrong at the individual-attempt level. If a single attempt carries a large downside — a public failure that damages a reputation you need, a bet you cannot afford to lose — skipping it can be rational. Gretzky’s line works because hockey shots are cheap and repeatable. Copying it into high-cost, low-repeat domains without adjusting for cost is where the advice breaks.
When not taking the shot is the correct call
The quote is a heuristic, not a rule, and edge cases matter more than the slogan.
Irreversible downside: a shot with a catastrophic, unrecoverable failure mode — a legal admission, a safety risk, a bet that wipes out savings — deserves skipping unless the expected value is clearly positive. Correlated attempts: 20 identical cold emails to the same buyer are not 20 independent trials; they are one annoyed prospect. Independence is a precondition for the compounding math. Reputational compounding: repeated visible failures in a small, tight-knit field can close doors, so the cost per attempt rises with each miss. Selection effects: you hear about the shots that landed, not the hundreds that did not, so the apparent success rate of “people who take shots” is inflated. Timing and information: sometimes waiting one week produces new information that doubles p, making the skipped attempt genuinely better.
The professional caveat: in portfolio management and venture investing, the “take more shots” logic is formalized as power-law returns. A small number of attempts produce nearly all the value, so the correct strategy is many small, cheap, independent bets — not many expensive ones. The quote supports the former and is misused to justify the latter.
What the quote gets wrong, and what it gets right
Misconception one: the quote says take every shot. It does not. It says the shots you do not take are guaranteed misses, which is a statement about the floor, not a command to maximize attempts.
Misconception two: attempts are free. Every attempt consumes attention, and attention is the scarcest resource in most professional lives. Ten well-chosen attempts often beat a hundred scattershot ones because attempt quality feeds back into p.
Misconception three: the quote is about optimism. It is closer to expected-value accounting. The optimistic reading — “just try things” — loses the cost term entirely.
Misconception four: the attribution is settled. The line is widely credited to Gretzky, but quote researchers have noted the phrasing varies across early sources and that similar sentiments appear in sports commentary before 1983. The safest statement is that it was popularized by Gretzky, not necessarily coined by him.
A comparison of how the principle shifts by context:
| Context | Attempt cost | Independence of attempts | Correct application |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recreational sports | Low | High | Take many shots |
| Sales outreach | Low | Medium | Take many, vary the pitch |
| Grant funding | High | Medium | Take fewer, better-prepared shots |
| Venture investing | Medium | High | Many small bets, power-law aware |
| Legal or safety decisions | Very high | Low | Skip unless expected value clearly positive |
A practical protocol for deciding which shots to take
The quote becomes useful when converted into a decision procedure rather than a slogan. The steps below use concrete thresholds you can apply today.
Estimate p honestly. Write down a rough success probability for the attempt. If you cannot estimate within a factor of two, run a cheap pilot first. Estimate the cost c in hours and dollars. Include recovery time from a likely failure, not just the attempt itself. Estimate the gain. If p × gain exceeds c by a clear margin, the attempt has positive expected value. Check reversibility. If failure is irreversible or damaging beyond recovery, require a much higher margin — a common threshold is p × gain at least 3 times c. Check independence. Confirm attempts do not cannibalize each other’s probability. If they do, treat them as one attempt. Set an attempt budget. Cap total spend (for example, 5 hours per week or USD 500 per month) so many small attempts cannot quietly become one large unrecoverable bet. Log outcomes. Track hit rates so your p estimates improve. After 20 attempts, your observed rate should inform attempt 21.
The reconciliation point: the “take more shots” advice and the “skip bad shots” advice are the same rule seen from two angles. Take shots when expected value is positive and failure is recoverable; skip them when either condition fails. The quote emphasizes the first half; the cost term supplies the second.
Limits of the principle and where the quote stops helping
The quote cannot tell you which shots to take, only that skipping all of them guarantees zero. It provides no estimate of p, no accounting for correlated failures, and no guidance on the psychological cost of repeated rejection, which is real and measurable. People who take many shots without feedback systems often experience attempt fatigue, and their p declines rather than compounds.
The quote also assumes attempts are independent draws from a stable distribution. In markets, hiring, and creative work, attempts change the environment: a failed launch can shift a competitor’s response, and a rejected pitch can alter a relationship. In those settings, the clean probability model overstates the value of volume.
Finally, the quote is often deployed as a cure for procrastination when the actual problem is unclear goals. Taking more shots without a defined success criterion produces activity, not progress. The professional version of the advice is narrower: take more cheap, independent, measurable shots, and skip the expensive, correlated, unmeasurable ones.
This article is general educational information about decision-making and probability, not a diagnosis, treatment plan, legal opinion, or investment recommendation. It does not promise outcomes or returns, and individual circumstances vary. For decisions involving health, safety, law, or significant finances, consult a qualified local professional.