Survivorship bias

During the Second World War, the American military had a problem. Their bombers were coming back from raids full of bullet holes, and they wanted to add armor to survive better. But armor is heavy, so they could only reinforce a few places. They studied the planes that returned, mapped where the holes clustered, mostly the wings and body, and prepared to armor exactly those spots. Then a statistician named Abraham Wald told them they had it backwards. The holes on the returning planes showed where a bomber could be hit and still make it home. The places with no holes, the engines, the cockpit, were where a hit meant the plane never came back to be counted. Reinforce where the survivors are clean, he said, because that is where the dead were hit. They listened, and it saved planes and lives.

Every success story you study is a plane that came back. The founder who tells you how they did it, the playbook everyone copies, the path you admire, they are all survivors, and their scars show what you can survive, not what will kill you. The ones who ran the same plan and disappeared cannot tell you why, because they are gone, and their absence is invisible, so the plan always looks safer than it is. Before you copy a winner, go looking for the ones who tried the same thing and vanished. Their story holds your real odds. How much of the winning was luck to begin with is the music lab.

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2001

The people who vanished are the main character. It will change how you read every success story after it.