"You Miss 100% of the Shots You Don't Take" — The Quote That Changed How We Think About Failure

The Origin Story: Who Actually Said It First?

Let's get one thing straight before we dive in — and yes, this is going to matter. The quote "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" is almost universally credited to Wayne Gretzky, the hockey legend so dominant that they literally called him The Great One. But here's where it gets deliciously complicated: Michael Scott, the lovably clueless regional manager from NBC's The Office, is equally famous for saying it — and always attributing it to Gretzky.

So now we have a three-layer citation sandwich: Wayne Gretzky said it, Michael Scott quoted it, and Michael Scott attributed it to Wayne Gretzky. The internet, naturally, went completely sideways with this. You've probably seen the meme a thousand times. But behind all the laughs and the memes and the t-shirts, there's something remarkably profound sitting in that short, punchy sentence that deserves a serious look.

Because here's the truth — whether you're a hockey legend, a fictional paper company manager, or just a regular person staring at a job application you've been avoiding for three weeks, this quote applies to you. It's not just a motivational poster tagline. It's a fundamental truth about human psychology, risk-taking, and the strange, paralyzing fear of trying.

What the Quote Actually Means (Beyond the Obvious)

On the surface, it sounds almost insultingly simple. Of course, you miss shots you don't take. That's just math. You can't score if you don't shoot. Thanks, Wayne. Super helpful.

But slow down for a second. The reason this quote has survived decades, spawned thousands of memes, and still gets plastered on office walls everywhere isn't because it tells us something we didn't know. It's because it tells us something we keep forgetting.

Human beings are wired for loss aversion. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky figured this out back in the 1970s, and it's been confirmed about a million times since: we feel the pain of losing something roughly twice as intensely as we feel the pleasure of gaining the same thing. Which means, on a primal, gut level, the fear of missing a shot (and looking foolish) almost always feels bigger than the excitement of potentially scoring.

That's why we don't send the email. We don't ask for the raise. We don't start the business. We don't say "I love you" first. We don't submit the manuscript. We stand at the edge of the moment, hockey stick in hand, completely frozen — and we tell ourselves all kinds of sophisticated, rational-sounding stories about why this isn't the right time, why we're not ready, why the odds aren't good enough.

And Wayne Gretzky, in exactly fourteen words, cuts through all of that.

Wayne Gretzky: The Man Who Understood Risk Better Than Almost Anyone

You can't talk about this quote without talking about the man behind it, because Wayne Gretzky's entire career was a masterclass in defying conventional wisdom about risk.

He wasn't the biggest player on the ice. He wasn't the fastest. By NHL standards, he was practically undersized. Every single scout and coach who evaluated him early in his career had perfectly logical reasons why he wasn't supposed to dominate the sport the way he did. And yet — by the time he retired in 1999 — he held 61 NHL records. Sixty-one. He scored more goals than any other player in NHL history, and here's the jaw-dropping part: his assists alone would make him the all-time leading scorer even without counting a single goal.

The man took shots. Constantly. Relentlessly. He took bad shots, he took long shots, he took shots when the angle was terrible and the odds were worse. And yes, he missed plenty of them. But he also rewrote every record book in the sport.

His philosophy wasn't recklessness — it was calculated audacity. There's a massive difference. Gretzky didn't fire pucks randomly at the net, hoping something would stick. He studied the game obsessively, positioned himself where the puck was going to be rather than where it was, and then trusted himself enough to pull the trigger when the moment arrived. Risk and preparation aren't opposites — they're partners.

The Psychology of Not Taking the Shot

Let's talk about what actually happens in your brain when you decide not to take the shot. Because this is where things get really interesting — and really uncomfortable.

There's a cognitive phenomenon called anticipated regret, and it works in two directions. You can regret things you did, or you can regret things you didn't do. Research consistently shows that in the short term, people tend to regret actions — the risks they took that didn't pan out. But in the long term — and we're talking years, decades, deathbeds — people almost universally report that their deepest regrets are about inaction. The paths not taken. The words not spoken. The businesses not started. The shots not taken.

There's even a name for the mental gymnastics we do to avoid taking shots: omission bias. It's the tendency to judge harmful actions more harshly than equally harmful inactions. In other words, we give ourselves a moral and emotional pass for doing nothing, even when doing nothing produces exactly the outcome we were trying to avoid.

Basically, our brains are running a pretty sophisticated con on us. We think we're being cautious and wise when we don't take the shot. In reality, we're just choosing a different kind of failure — the invisible kind, the kind that doesn't sting right away but accumulates quietly over years into something called regret.

Real-World Examples: When Not Taking the Shot Costs Everything

History is absolutely littered with people who didn't take the shot — and paid for it spectacularly.

Decca Records rejected The Beatles in 1962. The now-infamous quote from their audition: "guitar groups are on the way out." Decca chose not to sign them. Four guys from Liverpool went on to become the best-selling music artists in history. That's one very expensive missed shot.

Blockbuster had the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million in 2000. They passed. Netflix is now worth roughly $300 billion. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010. The executives who said no probably think about that meeting every single day.

Xerox invented the graphical user interface — the thing that makes your computer look like your computer, with windows and icons and a mouse. They didn't pursue it commercially. Steve Jobs saw it during a tour of Xerox PARC, immediately understood what he was looking at, and built it into the Macintosh. Xerox sat on a revolution and watched Apple change the world with it.

These aren't small examples. These are billion-dollar, industry-defining, history-altering moments that came down to somebody choosing not to take the shot. The shot was sitting right there. They looked at it, felt the fear, ran the numbers in their heads, decided the risk was too high — and missed 100% of it.

How Fear of Failure Masquerades as Wisdom

This one's sneaky, and it's worth spending some real time on, because this is the part where most motivational content completely drops the ball.

Fear of failure doesn't usually show up looking like fear. It's not a trembling voice and sweaty palms (though sure, sometimes). More often, it shows up wearing the costume of wisdom, maturity, and practicality. It says things like:

"I just want to make sure I'm fully prepared before I launch."
"Now isn't the right time — the market conditions aren't ideal."
"I need to do more research first."
"I don't want to come across as pushy/desperate/arrogant."
"I'll start on Monday."

Every single one of those sentences can be completely legitimate. And every single one of them can also be fear in a trench coat, pretending to be reason.

The trick is learning to tell the difference — and honestly, the easiest test is this: Have you been "preparing" for more than six months? Because after a certain point, preparation isn't preparation anymore. It's a delay tactic with better PR.

Gretzky didn't wait until he had the perfect angle. He skated toward where the puck was going and took the shot with the information he had. Perfect information never arrives. Perfect timing is mostly a myth. The shot is available now, or it isn't available at all.

Taking the Shot in Real Life: What It Actually Looks Like

Alright, so we've established that not taking shots is bad, fear is sneaky, and Wayne Gretzky was arguably the most efficient human being to ever hold a hockey stick. Great. But what does "taking the shot" actually look like in everyday life? Because "just do it" is about as useful as telling someone who's drowning to "just swim."

Let's get specific.

Taking the shot in your career means sending the application for the job you're 70% qualified for, not waiting until you tick every single box. Research — actual HR research — consistently shows that men apply for jobs when they meet roughly 60% of the requirements, while women tend to wait until they meet 100%. That gap in shot-taking translates directly into a gap in career advancement. The qualification bar isn't a checklist — it's a suggestion. Take the shot.

Taking the shot in relationships means saying what you actually feel instead of waiting for the other person to go first. It means having the hard conversation before it becomes a catastrophic conversation. It means telling someone you care about them while you still have the chance. The number of people who've stood at a graveside wishing they'd said something — that's a number too high to count. Take the shot.

Taking the shot in entrepreneurship means launching the thing before it's perfect, because it's never going to be perfect. Every successful product you've ever used started as a version that embarrassed its creator. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, famously said that if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late. Take the imperfect, scrappy, not-quite-ready shot.

Taking the shot in creativity means posting the article, submitting the manuscript, sharing the painting, recording the song — before you're absolutely certain it's good enough. The brutal reality of creative work is that "good enough" is a horizon that keeps moving. You will never feel ready. The work will never feel finished. At some point, you have to decide the shot is worth taking and pull the trigger.

The Math of Missing: Why More Shots Always Wins

Here's something the fear-brain doesn't want you to think about too clearly: the math always favors taking more shots.

Let's say you take 10 shots at something important — a new business idea, a creative project, a career pivot — and you have a 20% success rate. That's 2 successes. That's 2 things that worked.

Now, let's say you're so afraid of failure that you only take 2 shots, and you still have a 20% success rate. That's 0.4 successes. Roughly zero. You've protected yourself from 8 rejections — and also from 2 wins.

Volume and variance are your friends. This is what the most prolific creators, entrepreneurs, and innovators in history understood intuitively. Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb on his first try — by some accounts, he made over a thousand attempts before finding one that worked. He famously reframed every failed attempt not as a failure but as successfully discovering one more way that didn't work. That's not just a cute perspective shift — it's a mathematically sound strategy. More shots, more data, more chances for one of them to land.

James Dyson built 5,126 prototypes of his vacuum cleaner before finding the one that worked. Five thousand, one hundred and twenty-six shots that didn't go in before the one that revolutionized household appliances and made him a billionaire. If he'd stopped at prototype number 500 because he was tired of missing, you'd probably never have heard his name.

The people who seem extraordinarily lucky often aren't luckier than average — they've just taken more shots and increased the number of opportunities for luck to show up.

How to Train Yourself to Take More Shots

Because knowing you should take shots and actually doing it are two very different things, let's talk about some concrete ways to rewire the shot-avoidance instinct.

Start with small, low-stakes shots. This is basically exposure therapy for your fear of trying. Take one small, slightly uncomfortable shot every day. Email someone you admire. Post something you're proud of. Pitch a small idea. Each successful attempt — even ones that don't "work" — builds evidence that the world doesn't end when you put yourself out there.

Set a "rejection quota." This sounds perverse, but it's genuinely effective. Give yourself a goal of, say, 10 rejections per month. Chase them actively. What happens is counterintuitive: you stop dreading rejection and start treating it as a checkpoint on the way to your actual goal. Author Jia Jiang did this for 100 days straight, deliberately seeking rejection, and the results were extraordinary — including one famous interaction where he asked a Krispy Kreme employee to make him a box of donuts shaped like the Olympic rings, and the employee just... did it. He said yes. The shot went in.

Make the cost of not trying explicit. Write it down. If you don't take this shot, what does your life look like in five years? In ten? Regret is abstract until you make it concrete. Once you've actually sat with the weight of what "not trying" means over a long timeline, the fear of trying suddenly looks a lot smaller by comparison.

Separate the outcome from the attempt. Your worth as a person isn't determined by whether the shot goes in. Gretzky missed shots constantly. The greatest basketball player of all time — Michael Jordan — missed over 9,000 shots in his career. The attempt is always within your control. The outcome often isn't. Focus your identity on being someone who takes shots, not someone who only makes them.

What Success Looks Like When You Actually Start Taking Shots

Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough in these conversations — what happens on the other side.

When you start taking shots consistently, something shifts. It's not that everything starts working out perfectly. That's not how this goes, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What actually happens is subtler and more powerful: you stop being afraid of the miss.

The first rejection still stings. The second one stings a little less. By the tenth, you've built a callus. Not a numbness — a callus. You still feel it, but it doesn't stop you. And then something remarkable happens: you start noticing which shots are going in. You start learning what works and what doesn't. You start making adjustments. Your aim gets better. Your timing improves. The percentage of shots that land starts to climb.

This is the part that looks like talent from the outside. People watch someone operating with confidence and precision and assume they were born with it. They weren't. They just took a lot of ugly, embarrassing, unsuccessful shots in private before the world started paying attention.

Gretzky wasn't born great. He was born with aptitude, and he spent thousands of hours on the ice taking shot after shot, learning the geometry of the game, understanding how the puck moved, and where the net was going to be. The greatness was a product of the practice. The practice was a product of the willingness to take shots, miss, and take another one.

Conclusion: The Shot You Don't Take Has Already Missed

Here's where we land, and it's worth sitting with for a moment.

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" isn't motivational fluff. It's a statistical fact dressed up in a hockey metaphor. The shot you don't take hasn't been "not missed yet." It has already missed. It missed the moment you decided not to take it. The regret that lives on the other side of un-taken shots doesn't come from trying and failing — it comes from knowing you had the stick in your hand, the angle was decent, the window was open, and you let it close without firing.

Wayne Gretzky understood something that most of us spend our whole lives circling around: the cost of inaction is always higher than the cost of failure. Failure teaches you something. It gives you data, experience, calluses, and occasionally a really good story. Inaction gives you nothing but the quiet, creeping accumulation of "what if."

So whatever your shot looks like — the email you haven't sent, the business you haven't started, the conversation you've been avoiding, the creative work sitting in a folder on your desktop — take it. Not because it's guaranteed to go in. Not because the timing is perfect or you're completely ready. Take it because you are currently in the process of missing 100% of it, and that outcome is the only one that's absolutely certain if you keep your stick on the ice.

The net is right there. You've got the puck. Take the shot.

Wednesday, December 31, 2025