• The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful.
• The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.
• YANSS

Just watched this TED talk video from the creators of You are not so smart YANSS about Survivorship bias.

How many of us are reinforcing strengths, neglecting knowledge of challenges?

Comparison & learning from those ‘that have made it’ can lead us to false beliefs in actions and choices.

The speaker shares examples from restaurants … and this is really appropriate to business & leadership.

This sycophantic praise of leadership creating straw man arguments that only the ubermensch can fulfill, causes unfulfilled desire to emulate the few who were lucky, or born with privilege or  amassed success.

Those that have survived have a skewed belief their choices & path are right (this is hindsight bias) when in reality it could have happened many, many other ways.

There are 1000’s of others out there that tried, we know nothing about them. This leads to a comparison warping our perception of success.

Instead of looking & comparing ourselves to the whole (all that have tried) we compare ourselves to survivors – that skews our own perception of success.