The explanation doesn't have to be so complicated and mathy. If you have a 40 percent chance at Whatever, that's 40 out of 100, or 400 out of 1000, or 4000 out of... etc. We don't know the sample size. For the sake of this example we'll stick with 40 out of 100. So you make your attempt and fail. Here's where a lot of people go wrong. Just because you had a 40 in 100 chance and your first try failed, that does NOT mean your second try is now a 41 in 100 chance, your third a 42 in 100, and so on until you're at a 99 out of 100 chance because you've failed 59 times. That's not how it works. It doesn't mean that your chance of success gets higher with every failure. Your second attempt has the exact same odds. Every single attempt has the exact same odds totally regardless of how many times you've tried.