Success stories suffer from survivorship bias.

Success stories are the lifeblood of this forum. They are the lifeblood of entrepreneurship. Interestingly, they are also naturally gated. After all, you can't write an authentic success story about your business unless you have actually achieved some sort of success yourself. In other words, only the successful tell success stories.

Survivorship bias is a logical fallacy whereby an observer draws false conclusions about an outcome because it’s the only outcome they can see.

The classic example is damaged aircraft in World War 2 returning to base, riddled with bullet holes. Naturally, if your goal was to protect the fleet, it would be wise to reinforce these damaged areas with stronger armor. That way, the planes will return less damaged next time. Right? Right.

Wrong. The correct choice is to reinforce the least damaged parts of the plane. The parts without any red dots. Remember, you only saw the planes that even returned to base in the first place. You didn’t see the ones that were shot down. More importantly, you didn’t see that they were shot down because they took damage in one of these places. The correct conclusion is that the least damaged parts of surviving planes are actually the most critical for their survival. Survivorship bias clouded your judgement.

When a successful bootstrapper reports a 10k MRR milestone, our judgement as readers, as observers, risks similar cloudiness. We celebrate the win. We feel inspired. Perhaps we reinforce our own habits with some best-practices from the story. But if we simply imitate the story’s hero, will we too, find success? Not necessarily.

For every success we see, there are a thousand failures we never will.

To make your own successful eBook, you might conclude that you need to copy the marketing methods of Indiehacker Joe’s eBook success story. You may not see that the most important reason Joe was successful was because he has 50,000 twitter followers and 3 years of established social credibility. Joe may not see it either. Or, more realistically, he may not accurately weigh the significance of that advantage. How can you after all? (Seriously, how can you? Someone please answer this question.)

Just as bias clouds our judgement, it also clouds that of successful entrepreneurs. We’re dealing with people after all, not planes.

Perhaps eCommerce Rick’s 7-figure revenue milestone has less to do with his business acumen, and more to do with his relationships. Perhaps the motivation from being surrounded by ambitious friends is actually what made that achievement possible. And perhaps, with that level of motivation, he could have been successful at anything. In this scenario, to best imitate Rick’s success, it’s not as important to adopt the management style he so brilliantly outlines in his story as it is to simply make some new friends.

Perhaps Solofounder Jane’s 30k MRR SaaS is less about her impressive mix of tech and design skills, and more about how she has low overhead and plenty of savings. As a result, she was able to spend thousands more hours building than the 10 identical competitors that failed before her. She survived. They didn’t. In this scenario, success isn’t just “learn full-stack programming.” It’s also “don’t have student loan debt.”

Perhaps Crypto Chris’s astronomical 2021 portfolio gains are not the result of hard money fundamentals, as his success story proudly evangelizes, but the result of hype cycles, stimmy checks, and Elon Musk’s twitter account.

The reality is, many factors are predictive of “success.” And these factors don’t necessarily make it into the plots of the success stories we see every day. They may not even make it into the plots of our own stories we tell about our own victories.

Imitating successful people is akin to reinforcing the damaged parts of the plane. It seems right. It probably doesn’t hurt. And in most cases, probably even helps! But it also might not have very much to do with actually achieving success.

We are all biased after all. We only see what we can see. We only see what survives.