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Beating Survivorship Bias for Better Decisions
It’s why you need to be wary of success stories
Success stories overwhelmingly highlight the winners.
What about the fallen failures? We rarely hear those tales. This one-sided view stems from an invisible bias that distorts reality.
In short, it misleads our decisions.
It’s a huge issue for us. Naturally, we want to make progress in the world. We want to do better or have better things than others. The obvious solution is to look at those who have already got what we want. If we just do what they did, we could put ourselves in the same position.
Unwittingly, we have taken the first step towards letting survivorship bias fool us.
This piece should serve as a warning to you. Why? Because survivorship bias will misguide your efforts and leave you deeply disappointed.
Let’s dig in.
What is Survivorship Bias?
Survivorship bias means you will be:
- Focusing only on people or outcomes that made it past some selection criteria
- Overlooking those that failed
You will end up with a distorted view of how things work.
