Ashwin Upadhyaya's Blog

Avik Pramanik sends me this interesting post: Business advice plagued by survivor bias. Do you learn lessons only from success? And not hear the “lessons learned” from a guy who hasn’t yet learned those lessons himself? If the answer is yes to some extent at least, then you should read that post. The world war II anecdote in the post would definitely keep you interested.

I think even I have been biased this way for a long time now. And the important part is, I didn’t even know about it. Now if I think about it, the tiny tiny successes that our company has had till now are not due to replicating the successes of others but due to analyzing the mistakes that we did in our past. Had I looked at the mistakes of others rather than the successes of others, probably we could have avoided some of our own  mistakes.

However, human psychology works that way. We typically want to read about successes. Successes typically make a good read. And then, we want a simple formula which the successful ones followed so that we can replicate it ourselves. That rarely works. The outlier principle says that “success is not due to simple, controllable factors”. Amazon didn’t work because they followed some set of rules. They don’t even publish a telephone number on their front page. (You have to dig the site to find it)!! (Sorry, I had to use a success story again ).

My point is, rules don’t exist. Outliers just do it anyway.