Will Hard Work Make You Success? This Is Just A Survivorship Bias

Most of people would like to worship the successful people, imitate their behaviour, understand the past of them, study every word that they had said, and they will try to be the successful people who they like. However, most of people are failure, you should know about what’s psychological “survivorship bias”.

Survivorship bias or survival bias is a common logical fallacy, which means that you only see the results of a certain screening without realising the screening process. Therefore, you have ignored the critical information that has been screened out.

In general, we will only pay attention to the result, rarely pay attention to the process. All or most of the information we rely on to analyse the problem comes from “significant information”, less consideration of “non-significant information”, or even ignoring “silent information”.

Who have survivorship bias can lead to excessively optimistic beliefs, because failure is ignored, for example:

Some people mentioned with regards to Steve Job’s “follow your dreams” advice. You hear that a lot from successful people, but what you don’t hear are the catastrophic stories of those who followed their dreams.

Why you read a lots of successful stories, but you are still struggling on the verge of failure?

Behind one successful story, there were exist thousand to million case of failures you never thought.

If you count how many success stories you see in life compared to stories that who had failed. You will see that most people fail even when they are qualified to be successful except for luck.

The story of a successful person can only be used as a reference because nobody knows how many times he/she has failed before success, and people prefer to see the results in fact.

Accordingly, this has caused many people to think that if they follow the successful person’s practice, then they do it again they can also succeed.

In short, advice from successful people is always pretty, because most people only remember the part of success, then ignore the process. And that is because of survivorship bias. (Read Wiki for more detailed information)