(cited by Pixabay)
Survivorship bias is a wonderful way to misunderstand entrepreneurship and failure. People will look at the best and the most successful businesses out there and wonder what it takes to survive. They will often only notice the businesses that have survived. On the internet, we have become people with "End result perceptions." We often look at the end result of a situation and become fixated on the target result of something rather than the process.
This is the confusion between product and process. Process is the hard work, and product is the end result. The end result is just a goal, and just the after thought. The process is needed and necessary. Survivorship bias is when we look at businesses and glance over the idea of how they have survived. An error comes from only focusing on surviving examples, causing us to misjudge a situation, or misjudge a business.
For instance we might think that being an entrepreneur is easy (Macy's Bankruptcy many times over) because we have not heard of failures. This focuses on the ones who survived! IE: Google, Tesla, and so on... Why not look at the businesses that have failed? Survivorship bias distorts our idea of success. We think everything is a bed of roses without the thorns. You cannot make a decision based on past successes only while ignoring the failure as a massive teacher, yet we use the word "Epic Fail" or even "Fail." We live in a blame culture where people are not allowed to fail. They are not allowed to trip and fall and be embarrassed.
We often go to the gym and workout for a while. Then we notice we see the same people who are fit, and exercising everyday whenever we workout. After a while we become down and wonder why we aren’t able to stick to our workout and the effort for more than a week when most of the people there could keep up with it. We don't see the bias we just see the success, and not the person who could not keep up.
This creates a one sidedness and an imbalance in perspective. We see the successes while failure is a our biggest teacher, yet we punish and blame ourselves for our failures. Why? We live in a blame culture where "belief pollution" is poisoning our beliefs with negative memes that poke fun at our failures and mistakes. Traditionally In the film industry, a mistake is often considered more of a "missed-take", or missed opportunity.
The ideology of perfectionism has gone awry in the United States. The idea and expectations of perfection are what the internet has created. What about the hard work? What about the process rather than the product? We live in a world where the internet "End results" are the only things that we glance at. You can keep your eyes on the target, but also understand how to aim, and how to pull the bow!
The cause for this is that we make judgements in 3 basic lenses:
- Ego - Harsh judgement: Quick fast snapshot judgements
- Intellect - Logic
- Heart - Sense of detachment
Survivorship bias is when we only pay attention to the surviving end results that we see. The intellect seeks out the process and tries to connect and analyze. The heart will look at it and understand a disconnect. The ego judges immediately.
Next time you are at the gym remember the people who quit and didn't make it. Just keep going!
Let's hear your comments below!