Almost all advice about success suffers from the same flaw: it studies the winners and ignores the losers. We examine the people and companies that made it, extract their habits, and conclude those habits caused the success. This is survivorship bias, and it quietly corrupts a great deal of what passes for wisdom.
The problem is that the failures are invisible. For every celebrated founder who dropped out, took a huge risk, and won, there are many who did the same and vanished, and we never hear from them because they did not survive to give a talk. Studying only survivors, we see the traits they share and assume those traits are the cause, when the same traits may be just as common among the failures we cannot see. The dataset is missing exactly the cases that would tell us whether the pattern means anything.
Survivorship bias makes risky behavior look wise, because we see the winners who took the risk and not the many losers who took the same one. It makes idiosyncratic habits look like keys to success. And it makes outcomes that owed much to luck look like the predictable result of a formula. Advice built on survivors alone systematically overstates how controllable and repeatable success is.
The corrective is to always ask about the failures: how many people did this same thing and did not succeed? If the answer is many, the trait or tactic is not the cause it appears to be. Seek out the graveyard, not just the winners' circle, and treat any success story as one data point whose lesson is uncertain without knowing how the others who tried the same fared. Skepticism toward tidy success formulas is usually warranted.
Study the winners, and remember the ones you cannot see.
Published by Greenridge Media. Views expressed are the author's own.