It's our tendency to concentrate on the people who end up winning  —the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while removing from pur view all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.

When you solely focus on success, survivorsh...

We tend to overestimate the chances of success because success stories are more likely to be reported, while failure stories do not.

"Behind every popular author you can find a hundred other writers whose books never sell."

How to elude the survivorship bias?

• Do the digg...

Disagreements can create an “us versus them” mentality with clear winners and losers.

A better approach is to ditch the entire notion of winners and losers. Instead, you’re both on the same team working toward a better solution.