Survivorship Bias: The Truth Behind the Glory
Why Emulating Success Without Seeing Failure Is a Dangerous Game
Image By Martin Grandjean (vector), McGeddon (picture), US Air Force (hit plot concept) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102017718
We love a success story. The billionaire college dropout. The garage-born startup that conquers the world. The self-taught artist who makes it big. These narratives inspire us, shape our decisions, and often, unfortunately, mislead us. The problem? For every success we celebrate, there are countless failures we never hear about—because they didn’t survive the cut.
This is the realm of Survivorship Bias, a powerful cognitive illusion that fools us into concluding based only on visible successes while ignoring unseen failures. It’s like judging a book club by only talking to the people who finished the book.
What We See vs. What We Miss
Let’s rewind to World War II, where a group of statisticians and engineers were trying to figure out how to better armour Allied planes. They analyzed the bullet holes on returning aircraft and initially planned to reinforce the spots that were most often hit. But then Abraham Wald, a brilliant statistician, flipped the script: the planes they were examining had survived. The bullet holes showed where a plane could be hit and still make it home. The planes that didn’t return? Those were likely hit in fatally vulnerable areas—places with no bullet holes on the surviving planes.
Wald’s insight saved lives. It also became a textbook case of survivorship bias.
The Myth of the “Proven Path”
Survivorship bias lurks in everyday life. Consider the world of entrepreneurship. We lionize Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and more. Their stories are held up as blueprints for success. Quit your job. Follow your passion. Take risks. But for every one of them, there are thousands—millions—who followed the same script and failed spectacularly. Their stories don’t get TED Talks. They don’t make it into business school case studies. They’re invisible.
And that invisibility is what makes survivorship bias so dangerous. It doesn’t just give us bad data—it gives us incomplete data, and we don’t even know it.
Fitness, Fame, and Fortune
The bias extends everywhere: fitness influencers selling routines that “worked for them,” ignoring the people who tried the same and got injured or saw no results. Authors who talk about “never giving up,” gloss over the years of rejections most writers endure—sometimes forever. People who got rich in crypto forgot to mention the timing, luck, or risk they took that others couldn’t afford.
We confuse survivors with experts. We equate survival with skill, forgetting that sometimes, success is more about chance than choice.
The Real Cost
Survivorship bias doesn’t just mislead individuals—it warps entire industries. Education systems are built around “successful” methods. Investment strategies are based on back-tested data that only includes companies that are still standing. Even historical narratives are shaped by the victors, not necessarily the just.
It creates a world where failure seems rare, when in reality, it’s the default. We’re standing in a graveyard of invisible losses, admiring the few statues that remain.
So What Can We Do?
Seek the unseen. Ask: who didn’t make it? Why not? What am I not seeing?
Balance the stories. For every successful person you admire, look for ten who tried and didn’t make it. Learn from them too.
Question easy narratives. If something sounds too neat, or too certain, it probably is. Real life is messier.
Final Thought
Success is loud. Failure is quiet. Survivorship bias turns up the volume on one and mutes the other. But if we want to make smarter decisions, build sustainable systems, and truly understand how the world works, we have to look beyond the winners. Sometimes the most valuable lessons come from those who didn’t make it.
The invisible stories matter too.
As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or comments. Happy musing!