During World War II, the US military asked mathematician Abraham Wald to study how best to protect aeroplanes from being shot down.
The military knew armour would help but couldn’t protect the whole plane or would be too heavy to fly well.
Initially, they planned to examine the planes returning from combat, see where they were hit the worst – the wings, around the tail gunner and down the centre of the body – and then reinforce those areas.
But Wald realised they had fallen prey to survivorship bias because their analysis was missing a valuable part of the picture: the planes that were hit but that hadn’t made it back.
Consequently, the military was planning to armour precisely the wrong parts of the planes. The bullet holes they were looking at actually indicated the areas a plane could be hit and keep flying – precisely the areas that didn’t need reinforcing.
You can see this bias happening almost every day on social media platforms, too.
“Seven Success Habits of Multi Billionaires”
”The Five Morning Routines of Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg”
”The Million Dollar Morning”
And what-not.
It’s as if you follow the morning routines of these people; you will become the next Warren Buffatt, Jeff Bozos or Mark Suckerberg.
You see, for every big success in the world, there are probably thousands, or even tens of thousands of failures.
Survivorship bias is a common logical error that distorts our understanding of the world. It happens when we assume that success tells the whole story and when we don’t adequately consider past failures.
But failure stories are not as sexy as stories of triumph, so they rarely get covered and shared. As we consume one story of success after another, we forget the base rates and overestimate the odds of real success.
The problem arises when we mistake the winners for the rule and not the exception. People like Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are anomalies at one end of a distribution curve.
While there is much to learn from them, it would be a mistake to expect the same results from doing the same things.
The danger in basing your understanding of the world on those who have ‘beaten the odds’ or have succeeded by taking ‘big risks’ becomes evident if you carefully consider the logic of those phrases.
Think about it. If everyone was succeeding by taking a big risk, it can’t have been that big a risk, nor the odds that daunting.
We are tempted to think success is due to particular characteristics which can be emulated.
Just remember this, sometimes, success can also come down to luck.
