Advice From Successful People Is Missing Half the Data
There’s a famous story from the Second World War. Engineers studying bombers that returned from missions noticed the bullet holes clustered on the wings and tail, and proposed armouring those areas. A statistician pointed out the problem: they were only looking at planes that came back. The ones hit in the engine never returned to be counted. Armour the engine.
Almost all advice about success has this problem, and almost nobody adjusts for it.
The ones who didn’t come back
For every person who quit their job to follow a passion and is now telling you to do the same, there are many who quit and quietly went back to work two years later, poorer. They don’t give talks. For every founder who bet everything and won, there are far more who bet everything and lost the house. They don’t write books. The advice you hear is filtered by survival, and survival often had more to do with timing, luck, and starting conditions than with the thing they’re telling you to copy.
What this did to me
In my thirties I took a large risk largely because every success story I’d absorbed involved someone taking a large risk. What I hadn’t absorbed, because it wasn’t available, was the much larger set of people who’d taken the same risk and failed. I’d armoured the wings. The engine took the hit. It took years to recover, and the lesson wasn’t “don’t take risks.” It was “you’re only hearing from the survivors, so discount accordingly.”
Questions to ask of any advice
How many people did this and didn’t make it? If the answer is unknowable, assume it’s large.
What did this person have before they started? Savings, connections, a spouse with an income, a safety net they don’t mention. Those advantages are usually the real story and rarely in the book.
Would this advice still look wise if it had failed? “Bet everything” sounds like courage when it works and recklessness when it doesn’t. The decision was the same. Only the outcome changed the label.
What are the people who failed saying? They’re harder to find but they exist, and their lessons are usually more useful because they’re about what actually breaks.
What to do instead
Take risks you can survive losing. Not no risks; survivable ones. Keep the engine armoured even when all the visible holes are in the wings. Look for advice from people who’ve seen many attempts, not just their own: the investor who’s watched a hundred companies, the teacher who’s watched a thousand students. They’ve seen the planes that didn’t come back.
And be suspicious of your own story
The things I’ve done that worked, I’m tempted to explain with my decisions. Some of it was decisions. Some of it was the year, the city, the person who happened to make a call. When I give advice now, I try to say which was which. Most people don’t, not out of dishonesty, but because from inside, survival feels like skill.
Next time
When someone successful tells you what to do, ask what happened to everyone else who did it. Then decide with the full set of planes in view.
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