The dangers of survivorship bias
The narratives spun by survivorship bias mislead the ambitious.
Survivorship bias is the cognitive failure of giving disproportionate credit to something that made it past a selection filter. Using economic success for example, it would be giving more credit to the opinions of Elon Musk over John the Uber driver. This initially seems counterintuitive, but it really depends on the circumstances. You may be able to take jet propulsion advice from Elon over John; but as to the path to billions of dollars, Elon’s (I hope he doesn’t mind me referring to him so casually on a first name basis) answers may not be as valuable as you think.
One of the great podcasters, one whose early work I personally enjoy listening to, is Tim Ferriss. He’s an incredible human. On his show, one of the things he’s know for is exploring the morning routines of his high performing guests. Their habits, what they had for breakfast and teasing out other intimate features of their day that they repeat habitaually. From entrepreneurs, to actors, to athletes… everyone shares the things that they believe make them successful and that for listeners, certainly make them more human and relatable. Some of the greatest business books of all time, like Good to Great, a favorite of mine, dive deep analyzing the most successful and admired companies that transcend market cycles. Biographies spin the tales of the lives of Einsteins and Washingtons. We gobble it up, take pieces and apply them to our lives in hopes of being better, greater, smarter. We set goals, wake up early, and our veggies.
I’ll pause here for a moment and point out (as noted by James Clear) that there are far more people that set goals, wake up early and don’t achieve stardom than those that do. That’s not to say that goal setting isn’t a prerequisite of success (however you define it) but it is to say that there is no evidence that supports goals causing success. It is most certainly not the differentiating factor and it can’t be proven that goal settings is required to achieve whatever success you’re chasing (although, logically, to be chasing something, that something is the goal). There are far more smart, ambitious, hard working folks that woke up early, set ambitious goals, and stayed at it that didn’t achieving blistering, biography-worthy success.
To understand something that causes success you have to look at what the majority of successful (as you define it) people did that most unsuccessful people didn’t do. This is very hard to achieve as the set of those that didn’t achieve goals are far more significant and difficult to uncover. How do you find an ambitious entrepreneur that never started a company or that failed before critical mass was achieved? The latter is easier, by my gosh, it’s a lot of people. Taking advice from successful people is collecting anecdotal data. It’s inspiring at best, and misleading at worse. The things they did that caused their success are the things other people did that didn’t get them to where they wanted to go. Another interesting path, also difficult to explore, is the inverse. What did most unsuccessful people do that successful people absolutely did not do?
If you survey 10,000 millionaires across the world and it turns out that 90% of them jump up and down on their left foot for 3 minutes every other Wednesday while patting their head, or more likely, woke up before early or ate at least one meal a day, you can’t prove that this will get any closer to achieving your version of success. The 1 billion other folks (that can afford it) probably ate a meal every day too and if they did the hopping exercise their bank account wouldn’t start minting new Bitcoin nor would they become faster or more politically influential.
Studies of successful companies or people, no mater how fun or inspiring don’t provide actionable differentiators. It may turn out that risk taking, luck, and environment play a more significant role than we care to admit. My advice, and it isn’t worth much if you buy into this article (and arguably less if you don’t buy in), is to study system, habit and process optimization and to be highly selective with who and what you read and listen to, but that you consume a lot from multiple perspectives.
I suspect having a bias towards action and a latticework of mental models at your disposal may be among the keys to success but I steal these opinions from the famous survivors Sam Walton and Charlie Munger. I wonder what DaVinci ate for breakfast.
Interesting! "Timing is one of the five factors of startup success — it's actually the single biggest reason why startups succeed or fail. The other four (the idea, the team, the business model, and funding) don't even come close." https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_start_ups_succeed