If you have a 99% chance of failure, for a given task, then if you attempt it 459 times, your chance of success will be over 99%.

It gets better than this - after only 69 attempts, your chance of success is already greater than 50%.

If we plot this out, we can see that even if your chance of success each time is only 1%, it doesn't take that many attempts to start to have a significant chance of success.

Get climbing that curve!

#lang racket
(require plot)
(define (f x) (- 1 (expt 0.99 x)))

(plot-title "Chance of at least one win, where chance per-attempt is 0.01")
(plot-width 800)
(plot-height 800)
(plot-x-label "Number of Attempts")
(plot-y-label "Chance of Succeeding at least once")
(plot-font-size 22)
(plot (function f 0 500 #:y-max 1 #:y-min 0))

This thought came to me while working on processboard.io, an application to help manage and automate processes. You can request a free trial at https://processboard.io/join, or feel free to email me directly and I can refer you.