You’re probably going to fail – Info Entrepreneurship

The most likely situation for Greg is that he won’t get that ‘promotion’ and ‘better pay’ when he enters the new job.

This is where survivorship bias skewed his thinking.

In a nutshell, being exposed to more success stories and biased advice will lead to delusions and overestimating/underestimating. While Greg originally had doubts about a successful career change, he was presented with success stories, advice, articles (i.e. biased sources) overtime. When Greg decides to hit that ‘send’ button, it is highly likely that Greg has higher expectations and also reckons that he can get a new job quickly.

In life, we’re faced with many success stories. Startups becoming unicorns only after a few years. Bands formed since high school performing around the world. Rappers who only uploaded their mixtape on SoundCloud and made it big with just that one track.

Behind that unicorn startup are millions of startups who barely hit the $100m valuation mark. Behind those $100m startups are those that barely hit $1m. Behind those $1m are those that are still seeking their first $100k.

Behind those pre-seed startups are just people wondering whether they should be entrepreneurs.

As humans, we tend to estimate inaccurately. We underestimate the time it takes for us to travel from one place to other. We overestimate our own abilities when given a challenging project by the boss. With survivorship bias, we overestimate our chances of success, solely because we ‘keep seeing’ people succeeding. The only reason why we’re seeing so many success stories is because 99% of the losers don’t write theirs.

The only reason why we’re seeing so many success stories is because 99% of the losers don’t write theirs.

The vast number of business, trading, and self-help books should keep you skeptical: how can everyone be so successful at everything? If you can learn how to day-trade profitably just by reading this book, why haven’t you’ve heard more stories of people being millionaires from day-trading? And what about the pile of thousands — if not tens of thousands, of trading books from various traders, gurus and financial experts?

Are all of them successful today? What about all of their readers (who committed and actually took action, of course)? Are all of them rich now?

This does not mean that Greg shouldn’t change his job though. What Greg should do is to:

1. Not have expectations
2. Understand that others having successful career changes does not guarantee or even indicate a probability of his success
3. Know that he has a higher chance of failing rather than succeeding at his new role

Knowing that you can fail is common sense, but it being conscious is a whole different matter altogether: we get blinded by our emotions — specifically, appealed to by various quotes, posts and advice.

Motivation is Irrational

Scrolling along your Facebook/LinkedIn feed, you can find yourself looking at various pictures with beautiful backgrounds (usually of stereotypical cities like New York or successful, bottom-face-only, businessmen in suits). On the faded, filtered picture, you see large texts with a (usually) false attribution at the bottom. It reads:

“You will never win if you never begin.” — Helen Rowland

It’s a great quote. To you, it might not seem like much. To Greg, that will seem like a sign from the universe. A sign from God maybe. He nods and agrees. Sending that application was the first step in the whole process.

If survivorship bias came in here, the quote wouldn’t have made much of a difference. In the situation where Greg lands a job that he enjoys even less than the previous one, you could say that Greg would’ve ‘won’ if he ‘never begun’, contrary to what the quote says.

How can we marry survivorship bias and irrationality, even though they’re both like oil and water?