You’ve heard the phrase a million times. It’s the go-to shorthand for something that’s basically impossible. But here’s the thing: one in a hundred thousand isn't actually that rare when you look at the sheer scale of the world we live in.
It’s a weird number. It sits right in that "uncanny valley" of statistics where it’s too frequent to be a miracle, but rare enough that if it happens to you, your entire life changes. Think about it. In a city like Los Angeles, there are about 38 people walking around who represent that specific sliver of probability for any given event. It happens. It’s happening right now.
Statistics are boring until they aren't. We usually ignore the math until we're the ones sitting in the doctor's office or holding a specific type of lottery ticket. But understanding the reality of these odds—the "one in a hundred thousand" events—is actually a superpower for navigating risk and spotting real opportunities.
The Math of the "Impossible"
Let's get the boring part out of the way, but I promise to keep it quick. One in a hundred thousand is $0.001%$. In scientific notation, that’s $10^{-5}$.
Does that feel small? It should. If you had a book with a hundred thousand words in it, one specific word would be your target. That’s roughly the length of a decent-sized novel. Imagine flipping to a random page, pointing your finger, and hitting the word "pterodactyl" on the first try. That’s the vibe we’re dealing with here.
But scale matters.
Global populations are massive. If something has a one in a hundred thousand chance of happening to a person today, it will happen to 80,000 people globally before the sun goes down. Suddenly, the "impossible" looks like a packed football stadium. This is what statisticians call the Law of Truly Large Numbers. When you have a big enough sample size, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.
Where These Odds Show Up in Real Life
You see this number pop up a lot in medicine. Specifically, it’s often the threshold for what defines a "rare disease" in certain jurisdictions, though the official definitions vary by country.
Take something like Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (FOP). It’s a terrifying condition where muscle and connective tissue gradually turn into bone. The prevalence? It’s roughly one in two million. So, a one in a hundred thousand condition is actually twenty times more common than that.
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Rare Diseases and Genetic Flukes
Medical journals are littered with these figures. For example, the incidence of certain rare cancers or specific adverse reactions to medication often hovers around this mark. If a drug has a "one in a hundred thousand" side effect profile, the FDA usually considers it quite safe for the general population. But if you’re that one person? The statistics don't matter. To you, the probability was 100%.
Then there’s the world of sports and talent.
The Athlete's Curse
What are the odds of making it to the NBA? If you’re a high school basketball player in the US, the odds of being drafted are actually much better than one in a hundred thousand—it's more like 1 in 3,333.
But what about being a 7-footer?
There’s a famous (though slightly debated) statistic from Sports Illustrated suggesting that if you are a 7-foot-tall American male between the ages of 20 and 35, there’s a 17% chance you’re currently in the NBA. That’s insane. In that context, the "one in a hundred thousand" person isn't the athlete—it's the person who has the physical gifts and the mental discipline and avoids the freak injuries.
True "one in a hundred thousand" talent is someone like Shohei Ohtani. A guy who can elite-level pitch and elite-level hit simultaneously. We aren't just talking about being "good." We're talking about a statistical anomaly that breaks the existing model of the game.
Risk Perception: Why We’re Bad at This
Humans are evolutionarily hardwired to be bad at math. Our ancestors didn't need to understand $10^{-5}$; they needed to know if that rustle in the bushes was a tiger.
Because of this, we treat a one in a hundred thousand risk exactly the same as a one in a million risk. We lump them all into a category called "Probably Won't Happen."
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The Shark Attack Fallacy
People are terrified of sharks. The odds of being killed by a shark are roughly 1 in 4.3 million. You are significantly more likely to be the "one in a hundred thousand" person who dies from a ladder fall or a specific type of accidental poisoning. Yet, we don't have "Ladder Week" on the Discovery Channel.
We over-index on dramatic, cinematic risks and under-index on the mundane ones that actually carry these specific odds.
Lightning Strikes and Lottery Tickets
Winning the Powerball jackpot is about 1 in 292 million. You have a much, much better chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime (about 1 in 15,300).
Basically, if you’re holding a lottery ticket, you’re looking for a "one in hundreds of millions" event. If you’re worried about a "one in a hundred thousand" event, you’re actually worrying about something that is relatively "common" in the grand scheme of things.
The Business of Rare Events
Insurance companies live and die by these numbers. They hire actuaries—the smartest math nerds on the planet—to figure out exactly how many "one in a hundred thousand" events will happen in a fiscal year.
If you’re an insurer, you know that out of 10 million policyholders, exactly 100 of them are going to have that specific, catastrophic "one in a hundred thousand" house fire or freak accident. They don't know who it will be, but they know for a fact it will be 100 people.
They price your premiums based on that certainty. Your life is a gamble; their business is a certainty built on the back of those gambles.
Digital Anomalies
In the world of technology, a one in a hundred thousand error rate is actually considered pretty bad.
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If you’re running a server farm or a global payment processor like Visa, and you have a "one in a hundred thousand" failure rate for transactions, you’re looking at thousands of failures every single hour. In tech, we aim for "five nines"—99.999% uptime. That means you’re only allowed to fail one in a hundred thousand times.
Even then, that tiny sliver of failure can cause chaos. A single bit-flip caused by cosmic rays—literally radiation from space—can hit a computer chip and change a 0 to a 1. It’s a classic one-in-a-hundred-thousand fluke. In 2003, this actually happened in an electronic voting machine in Belgium, adding 4,096 phantom votes to a candidate's tally because one specific bit was flipped.
How to Live with These Odds
So, what do you do with this?
Honestly, the best way to handle these odds is to stop thinking of them as "rare" and start thinking of them as "inevitable at scale."
If you want something good to happen—like a viral tweet or a business breakthrough—you have to increase your "at-bats." If the success rate is one in a hundred thousand, and you only try ten times, you’re basically guaranteed to fail. But if you automate your process or find a way to try 100,000 times, you’ve moved the needle from "impossible" to "likely."
On the flip side, for negative risks, it's about mitigation. You wear a seatbelt not because you expect a 1-in-100,000 fatal crash today, but because over a lifetime of driving, you’re going to be on the road for millions of seconds. Eventually, the clock hits that specific second where the odds catch up.
Finding the Signal in the Noise
Most of what we call "luck" is just people being on the right side of a one in a hundred thousand distribution.
We love to attribute success to hard work and failure to bad luck. In reality, it’s usually a messy mix of both. The person who wins the prestigious award or lands the "impossible" job often did the work to get into the top 1%, but then they had to win the "one in a hundred" coin flip that happened after that.
Actionable Insights for Handling Rare Events
Since you can't control the math, you have to control your response to it. Here is how you actually use this information:
- Audit your "Impossible" Fears: Look up the actual stats for things you're afraid of. If the odds are 1 in 100,000 or lower (like 1 in a million), and you're spending more than 5 minutes a week worrying about it, your brain is lying to you. Shift that energy to something with 1 in 100 odds, like heart disease or a car accident, and take action there (gym, defensive driving).
- The Power of Volume: If you're a creator or entrepreneur, stop obsessing over making one perfect thing. Aim to put out enough volume that you actually trigger the Law of Large Numbers. You need to give the "one in a hundred thousand" fluke a chance to find you.
- Check the "Five Nines": When buying tech or choosing a service provider, don't just look at "it works." Look for "uptime" or "reliability" ratings. A 99% success rate sounds great, but it means 1 out of every 100 attempts fails. You want the service that treats a one-in-a-hundred-thousand failure as a serious problem.
- Acknowledge the Outliers: When you hear a "miracle" story or a "horror" story, remind yourself of the denominator. One amazing thing happening in a world of 8 billion people isn't a sign the universe is changing; it's just math doing its job. This keeps you grounded and less likely to fall for "get rich quick" schemes or "the sky is falling" news cycles.
The world isn't as predictable as we want it to be, but it’s not as chaotic as it feels, either. Most things follow the curve. Whether you're the one who beats the odds or the one who gets hit by them, remember that in a big enough world, everything happens to someone. Your job is just to manage the risks you can see and keep swinging for the ones you want.