The Survivorship Bias

Survivorship bias is a logical error that twists our understanding of the world and leads to a wrong understanding of cause and effect.

We fall into survivorship bias when we assume that success stories tell the entire story of a product/business, while we don't properly consider past fail...

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...

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...