The No 1 Reason Any Advice isn't making you Successful السبب رقم 1 أي نصيحة لا تجعلك ناجحًا I can be a bit of a self-improvement junkie.
I’m the type of person who loves Ted Talks, self-help books, and advice columns. I’m always looking for ways to make my life better.
I’m not alone, of course. Who doesn’t love a good inspirational story about someone overcoming long odds to achieve something great? It’s these kinds of stories that breathe fire into us. They make us believe we can achieve something great, too — if only we follow the blueprint laid in front of us by the storyteller.
But the truth is, even when we follow these blueprints for success, it doesn’t always work out.
An example from my own life is the whole “early morning club.” You probably know what I’m talking about — the large subset of the self-improvement industry that advocates waking up super early to maximize your productivity throughout the day. Lots of self-help gurus at least partially attribute their success to their elaborate early morning routines which often include: waking up at 5 a.m., journaling, meditating, exercising, and eating a big breakfast all before 7 a.m.
And look, I’m not denying this works for some people. But for me, it doesn’t. I’ve written about this recently, but I’m not an early morning person. I’ve tried the whole early morning thing and it doesn’t influence my productivity and mainly makes me feel like shit. I’m a much happier and more useful person when I stick to a schedule that better aligns with my body.
All this is to say — after years of trying to follow in the path of successful people, there’s one thing I’ve learned: you can’t always trust a successful person’s formula for success to work for you. After all, in the case of my early morning example, there are plenty of successful people throughout history whose routines have flown in the face of this advice (Barack Obama, Winston Churchill, and Pablo Picasso are/were all famous night owls, for example).
And, as it turns out, there’s a psychological reason for why you can’t trust the advice you receive from CEOs, famous people, and other bigshots.
That reason is called survivorship bias.
Survivorship bias is our tendency to focus on the “survivors” of a given situation and to ignore or be blind to those who don’t survive or make it past a selection process.
Here’s a real-world example where survivorship bias came into play in a meaningful way (taken from journalist Dave McRaney’s Ted Talk):
During World War II, military commanders were trying to figure out how to make planes stronger. At the time, the chances of a bomber crew making it from the beginning of the war to the end were only about 50%. Obviously these aren’t great odds, so commanders had a vested interest in making them better.
Unfortunately, you can’t armor a plane like you can a tank, otherwise the plane won’t fly. So, the U.S. had to be strategic about how they reinforced the planes.
Initially, the team working on this problem focused on the planes that had made it back home. When looking at these planes, they’d noticed a trend among them — they mostly had bullet holes along the edges of the wings, the tail gunner, and in the center. The team decided then that they should armor those areas of the plane, since those appeared to be the areas getting shot.
This was their strategy until a brilliant statistician named Abraham Weld clued them in on a major factor they were missing: that these planes had made it home because it just so happens planes are better able to survive being shot in those areas as opposed to other areas. But because the commanders had only focused on the survivors, they hadn’t realized that the planes that hadn’t made it home were being shot in the cockpit and engine — and those were the areas that actually needed to be armored. Once they learned the error of their ways, they began to armor the areas of the plane that really needed it, which greatly improved the number of planes that were making it home.
So, you can see how focusing solely on the survivors of a situation causes you to miss large chunks of the bigger picture.
This bias towards survivors is the same reason why, when you’re walking through a beautiful old city and you look at the buildings you think to yourself: “Wow, they don’t make things like they used to. The architecture was way better and stronger back then.”
Well, that’s not necessarily true — it’s just that what you’re seeing are the survivors. You’re not seeing all the shitty buildings that fell apart or were leveled because they were such poor quality. We’re often not privy to all the failures because only the survivors remain.
This same principle is why we should be skeptical of taking advice from the rich, famous and wildly “successful”
When we take advice from these people, we’re often falling for that same bias.
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