Survivorship Bias

We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.

Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed.

In the United States, we live in a very results-oriented society. If someone is rich or famous or beautiful, we tend to think they deserve to be those things. Often, in fact, these factors are self-reinforcing: making money begets more opportunities to make money; being famous provides someone with more ways to leverage their celebrity; standards o

For example, a company may start a hundred funds but have only fifty left a couple of years later. The company can trumpet how effective their fifty funds are but ignore the fifty funds that failed and have been erased from history.