I think 99% of the time bringing up survivorship bias adds nothing to the conversation. If I tell you how I ran a marathon, you could shout "survivorship bias!" But that fact still stands that I hadn't successfully run a marathon before I did those things.
It's not meant to add to the conversation, it's meant to get people to shut up about giving advice on becoming successful.
There's no trick to it, you need to work and get lucky. Emphasis on the getting lucky. We don't need 1,000 thinkpieces from people who are already successful.
Give me an article from a person who can reflect on why they're not successful. That will be more interesting any day of the week.
> That will be more interesting any day of the week.
I doubt it. I'm not successful because I haven't even put in the work these articles lay out. And I definitely haven't gotten lucky. I assume millions of dollars definitely won't come my way until I at least do the part of the equation in my control.
Doesn't sound like a very interesting article to me.
> There's no trick to it, you need to work and get lucky. Emphasis on the getting lucky.
Pretty much everyone gets lucky eventually though. You might never hit a home run, but if you go to bat enough times then sooner or later you're going to get hit by the ball and walked to first.
The thing is running a marathon isn't that hard and there's little to no luck involved. By following a rigid plan most people can do it in about a year. Millions of people do it every year.
However if you followed all of Sam's advice to the letter you could remain relatively unsuccessful despite all that advice. That's what survivorship bias is about: there's a significant luck component to success.
> If I tell you how I ran a marathon, you could shout "survivorship bias!" But that fact still stands that I hadn't successfully run a marathon before I did those things.
Well, yeah, the whole point is that we don't know how many people did those same things and then failed to complete a marathon.
No, it is to distinguish activities that worked versus activities that are inconsequential. That way you can identify how to get the most bang for your time and energy.
