[ryandrake]

Survivorship bias is the major flaw in every business book and in all biographies of successful people. "Look at the attributes that success stories have in common, and IGNORE them when present in unsuccessful stories." This leads to people and companies cargo-culting the behaviors of well-known rich people and businesses, expecting success. Go read _Good To Great_. Business schools across the world are enamored with this book, but it's basically 300 pages of survivorship bias.

For every person you point to and say grit and perseverance made them successful, I'll point to ten who failed despite grit and perseverance.

[mwfunk]

Very true. It's a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would read the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed businesses, products, movements, governments, etc.

It's the whole "success hides failure" problem. It's really tempting to assume that everything a successful person or company does contributes to their success, but the truth is closer to, they did 10 things right and 9 things wrong. But it's difficult or impossible to determine which is which, hence the cargo-culting.

Even more frustrating is working for a successful company, because anybody who advocates change can be shot down with the argument that everything is going well therefore that's empirical proof that the thing you want to change is clearly just fine and dandy.

Ultimately the best we can do as individuals is to cultivate an innate sense of skepticism in all things, avoid reductivism, never drink our own Kool-Aid, and never fall into the trap of thinking that we've figured it all out and don't need to think and grow anymore.

[stdbrouw]

> Very true. It's a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would read the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed businesses, products, movements, governments, etc.

Survivorship bias actually works both ways: by studying only the failures you are quite likely to misunderstand what made them fail and you might zero in on characteristics that are actually shared by many successful businesses.

[FLUX-YOU]

>This leads to people and companies cargo-culting the behaviors of well-known rich people and businesses, expecting success.

I'm betting those business dudes are networking with people who share similar views more often than not. So if you get a large portion buying into what the books are selling, that will probably predict who they choose to network and work with [citation needed]. The network can then cushion your failures and amplify your successes.

Bonus points if you bring your Ivy League papers to the table, of course.

[thomaskcr]

It would be survivorship bias if the conclusion drawn was "if you have grit and perseverance, you'll succeed". That's not what I've gotten out of any book ever, it was always "these traits allowed me to take advantage of this opportunity that presented itself".

It's about developing skills and traits that would make you more likely to succeed should an opportunity present itself, or to help you realize an opportunity has presented itself.

There is no magic formula. There is no trait or skill that will guarantee success, but for every success story there is something that allowed them to take advantage of the cards they were dealt that without they would have been unable to.