
Survivorship Bias - rbanffy
https://xkcd.com/1827/
======
ryandrake
I had a professor who had the class stand up and all start flipping coins. If
you flipped tails you sat down and stopped. After several iterations he
interviewed the last remaining standing person to ask him what hard work he
did to become such a good coin flipper, and if he had any secrets about coin
flipping success he wanted to share with the class. It was a pretty nice
exercise and I think applicable generally to the hero-worship that often
surrounds successful people.

~~~
EduardoBautista
That is a terrible example. That's implying that you can just sit on your ass
all day and just watch TV and you have a 50% shot at success.

~~~
6nf
You still have to flip the coin

~~~
EduardoBautista
A much better example would be to have all students run around a 400 meter
track with some students having 1 - 100 meter head start.

~~~
jerf
No, that would completely miss the point.

This isn't about inequality or privilege, this is about survivorship bias. The
_entire point_ is to completely remove all those issues in a way that makes it
obvious to everybody that the _only possible explanation_ in this made-up
example is blind luck.

In the real world, it isn't all blind luck, but sometimes there are cases
where the luck signal does in fact overwhelm everything else, lotteries being
a great example.

~~~
EduardoBautista
Yes, and these are _extreme_ examples. Examples that try to make success
appear to be just luck.

~~~
jerf
"The entire point is to completely remove all those issues in a way that
_makes it obvious to everybody_ that the only possible explanation in this
_made-up example_ is blind luck."

------
ux-app
Most people are missing the point a bit here. Survivorship bias doesn't relate
to people who worked hard, improved themselves and now earn 1-10MM/yr. There
are loads of stories like that.

Survivorship bias is "Zuck did X, Y and Z, if I do the same then I'll be a
multi-billionaire too!"

Following the playbook of those that made it into the top 0.001% is foolish
and does not properly account for the large part luck played in their success.

There's no survivorship bias in going to med school, becoming a specialist and
then earning 400k/yr.

~~~
taneq
> There are loads of stories like that.

Not compared with the loads of stories of people who worked hard, improved
themselves, and still don't earn anywhere near $1M/yr. Otherwise thinking that
those successes have some meaningful advice to offer wouldn't be survivorship
bias, it'd actually be correct.

> Following the playbook of those that made it into the top 0.001% is foolish
> and does not properly account for the large part luck played in their
> success.

Exactly. As some guy once said, Taylor Swift telling you to put everything
into your dreams of becoming a pop star is like a lotto winner telling you to
spend your life savings on lotto tickets (a la the original comic).

~~~
ux-app
>Not compared with the loads of stories of people who worked hard, improved
themselves, and still don't earn anywhere near $1M/yr

The vast majority of single digit millionaires are doctors, lawyers,
construction company owners. I've even personally met a factory worker who
retired with > $1mm in savings due to prudent money management (no lottery
wins, just basic financial management for 30+ years).

I live in a completely unremarkable town and there are loads of millionaires
around. I bumped into one recently when I accidentally stumbled onto his
property while hiking. Judging by the sprawling estate he's at least in $5mm+
net worth range. What does he do for a living? He owns an earth moving
company. That's right, at the ripe age of about 45, he made tons of money
moving dirt from one spot to another. Lovely guy too.

My friend from high school is also in the millionaire club. We're both from a
public school background. Unremarkable back stories in just about every way
possible. Now he runs a very successful web agency. He's super smart, hard
working and I'm sure that accounts for the majority of his success.

My point is that there are _loads_ of millionaires around, even in my little
backwater. Far, far more than there are lottery winners. Seems to imply that
luck plays a far smaller role in the success of millionaire next door types
than simple hard work.

~~~
ryandrake
It's not about whether they're single-digit millionaires or billionaires. It's
about falsely attributing a causal relationship between the people's actions
and their success. It's about ignoring the counterfactual cases.

What about the factory workers who also practiced prudent money management and
did not end up millionaires?

What about the many other dirt movers who worked just as hard but did not end
up being the one owning the company?

What about the other smart web professionals who worked just as hard as your
high school friend yet do not currently run the show?

~~~
jerf
"What about the factory workers who also practiced prudent money management
and did not end up millionaires?"

Then he at least ended up better off than he would have if he had _not_
practiced prudent money management. Anything else would require stretching the
definition of "prudent" beyond anything that fits.

It is a fallacy to believe all of life's outcomes are purely due to skill, one
that will harm anyone who acts on it. But it is also a fallacy to believe that
all of life's outcomes are purely based on luck and privilege, and of the two,
this one is far more harmful to anyone who acts on it than the first one.

It is also a fallacy to believe that all possibly skill improvements are
equal, a fallacy that helps people over-attribute things to luck when they see
"Well, these two people both worked on skills and look at their divergent
outcomes!" But if one guy was carefully tuning the skills to things that the
market wanted and would lead to success, and the other guy followed, say, a
socially-approved educational outcome that produced a very shiny credential,
even perhaps in the same field, but did not provide real things that anybody
else wanted, you will get divergent outcomes. But that will be _less_ due to
luck than someone who assumes that the skills obtained by both were the same
would think.

~~~
didibus
I don't think what you're saying holds correct. You're just applying
survivorship bias at a smaller and therefore less obvious scale.

We do not know the amount of luck based causality versus non luck based. What
we do know is the probability of ending up a millionaire vs not.

So say it's 10% millionaire. I'm pulling this out of my ars. Now the question
becomes what non luck based actions were performed by the 10% of millionaire
and not by the 90% of non millionaire that caused them to become the ones to
end up millionaires.

That's not a trivial thing to answer. First, it's possible there exist no non
luck based actions. Maybe all actions had an element of luck. Second, it's
possible no single action had a majority role. So it becomes a sum of small
actions.

Now, even if we assume the best case scenario. That is, there exist a single
action which is 100% responsible and has no luck involved. Well, how did the
10% knew to do that and the 90% didn't? That's also luck,or a just as
complicated question to answer.

Now say the survivors, aka, the 10% came and said the secret guaranteed to
work action is X. It does not mean it is repeatable once there is already 10%
millionaires. What if the 90% now all do that magic action, there is not
enough money for 100% millionaire. So you can see that this action would not
anymore suffice and therefore starts to have an element of luck again.

~~~
jerf
We know I am correct that success is not entirely luck, because we can observe
that no success comes to someone who just sits and waits for luck to strike
them like a bolt of lightning. Even the lottery winner had to go out and buy
the lottery ticket. Note I'm partially defining success as something like "a
sustained and significant increase in wealth", so by my metric here even
someone lucky enough to be born to the wealthiest person in the world and
inherit more wealth than anyone else may still not experience "success" if
they fritter away the wealth to no great effect. I don't think this is an
unacceptable odd definition in this context, and those born into wealth so
great that they literally have no responsibilities in life and can't manage to
lose it no matter how hard they try are edge conditions anyhow.

This bounds luck's contributions to less than 100%. Mathematically that's a
pretty weak bound, but it's not hard to see that it must be substantially less
than that in the real world for the observed results to make sense, though.
How substantially is hard to even put numbers on, so I'm not going to try,
because the real point I'm trying to make here is that it is dreadfully
dangerous to sell the idea that success is entirely luck based. It is far more
dangerous to both individuals and the society they live in than to sell the
idea that success is based on skill and effort. As I am a rather old fashioned
person who still believes that truth is better than falsehood, the fact that
telling people that success is based on skill and work works better than
telling people that success is pure unadulterated luck suggests to me that the
"skill and work" explanation, while still not Aristotelian truth, is likely
_closer_ to the truth than the "pure luck" explanation. (I'm skipping over
some connecting justification there because this is an HN comment and not a
philosophy essay; if you agree truth is better than falsehood you can probably
fill it in yourself, and if you do not, then why are you arguing anyhow since
no argument will produce anything better than what you already have.)

~~~
didibus
It seems you don't really argue to know that luck is or isn't the only factor.
Which is really what I'm against. I'm against someone claiming he has proof of
an answer, and he believes it is the full truth.

So ya, I think the danger part you're also generalizing a little. There are
some people who telling them that luck isn't a factor is doing them a
disservice. Like people who have been unlucky. There are a lot of people who
try and fail. Why is that? It is not enough to work hard and spend a lot of
time chasing success, that's why. That's the essence of survivorship bias. You
must also be talented, smart, strong, tall, healthy, handsome, connected, etc.
These things I argue you have or don't pretty much based out of luck. Out of
everyone who tries, those who succeed will have either because of pure luck,
like imagine everyone trying did 100% exactly the same actions, and it still
ends up that only a fraction of those succeed, that would be pure luck. Or, it
is the luck of what has caused you to beat the others, to think of better
actions, and execute them better, to end up being one of the successful ones.

I personally think if our society acknowledged this, maybe we'd start thinking
about society differently. Maybe we'd be more inclined to accept social
programs. Instead of seeing everyone who is not a millionaire as lazy, and
like it is entirely their fault. Maybe we'd have to come up with an
organisation structure where maybe we don't have a winner takes most model. Or
we'd need to recognize people's individual strengths, and make sure we find a
way to make them helpful in those ways.

I see your point, and I actually mostly agree. I think it just depends who the
audience is. If you talk to youths, obviously you should try to motivate them
and ingrain into them a sense of having to work for success, and try to give
them the smarts to do so. Also have them believe the effort is not wasted, and
will make a difference in their life. But if you talk to people struggling to
succeed, even after putting in the effort, I think you should also recognize
that they can't be blamed entirely, a big part of success is luck. In the end,
our society must find the right balance between the two.

------
pipio21
Like fear, you should take Survivorship bias into account, but it should not
dominate you. If you do you will do nothing in life.

When I created my first company my parents told me about how hard it was going
to be, how few succeed... On the contrary I found it was way easier and
natural than studying engineering was, for example, and hundreds or thousands
of people could do it.

I found most serious people succeed in business. It is not that hard to become
a millionaire, way easier than being a salaried person, tens of thousands of
times easier than winning a lottery.

On the lottery you have absolutely no control about the outcome, on real life
you can "cheat" and control anything.

For example, one of the great discoveries in my life is that in business if
you don't know how to do something you can just hire the person to teach you
or your team or just do it for you.

That felt like cheating because I had been trained all my years on school and
job that you have to do all your job yourself, regardless you being good at it
or not.

That control makes it extremely easy to do things. For example you could work
with the people you want to work with, that makes your life way easier and
enjoyable than if you are externally forced to work with people you don't want
to work with.

In the startup world some people want to be billionaires, and that is probably
akin to winning the lottery. But I know some billionaires and do not envy
them. Traveling everywhere with armed escort because someone could kidnap your
children, so you live in a bunker isolated from everyone. Everywhere you go
someone wants something from you, a loan , to invest in them. Banks harassing
you all the time. Not knowing if people is around you just for your money.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
> I found most serious people succeed in business. It is not that hard to
> become a millionaire, way easier than being a salaried person

This is the trouble with discussions on this topic. Everytome Survivorship
bias comes up, someone provides "counter evidence" which happens to be a
picture perfect example of survivorship bias.

Most serious people don't succeed in business. It is hard to become a
millionaire. Way more people with the exact traits you'd describe as being
what's needed for success have failed than succeeded.

~~~
thenomad
_Way more people with the exact traits you 'd describe as being what's needed
for success have failed than succeeded._

Do you have proof of that assertion?

I'd tend to largely agree with the OP, although I think he's overstating the
point a bit. It's certainly not a great deal harder to get to the millionaire
point as an entrepreneur than as a conventional salaried worker - assuming you
have the appropriate character traits. If you're a self-starter with a fair
amount of willpower and the ability to effectively learn, lifestyle businesses
(as distinct from unicorns) are not massively tricky to grow. They're not
_easy_ , and there's definitely a learning curve, but it's on the "doable" end
of the scale.

(Background: I've built a few, and I teach other people to build them.)

 _Addendum: we should probably also start by defining "failed" here. If you
mean "way more people's first businesses fail than succeed", I'd agree with
you, absolutely. If you mean "way more people have started more than 8
businesses following best practice and have had zero successes than have had
any success", I'm much more skeptical. It's an axiom - even in the talks by
famous successful people mentioned in the comic - that you generally need a
few attempts to get the hang of launching and running anything._

~~~
aaron-lebo
Just take a look at the average YC batch. If anyone is set up to succeed, it
is those guys with coaching, resources, and connections. Most of them don't
become wildly successful and are only successful in any sense because of the
ability to pivot, learn lessons, etc. (see Schwartz's Infogami -> Reddit
transition). Or check out small business failure rates. More anecdotally and
less scientifically, watch retail/food locations which have business after
business after business open in them.

A successful lifestyle business takes a lot of learned knowledge, and by
virtue of building a single one you've had more success than most. Just
beating the odds on one was your survival, once you did that you had a lot of
advantages.

Bigger serial entrepreneurs often have similar patterns. One success allow you
to make another which allows you to make another, all with varying degrees of
success and with failure effectively subsidized. See Mark Cuban, Ev Williams,
Pewter Thiel.

~~~
thenomad
YC companies are, to the best of my knowledge, mostly looking for unicorn-
style plays. That's a very different game to a lifestyle business, and one
where I would agree 100% that the failure rate is extremely high.

Small business failure rates: well, for starters, the usually-quoted numbers
have been updated as of late. A quick Google shows that most sources are
converging on around a 60% success rate for small businesses at the moment. (I
think that's actually unrealistically high - I'd estimate more like 40% and
guess they aren't accurately polling online businesses, but hey.)

Secondly, there's a significant difference between small business failure
rates and small businessperson failure rates. As I mentioned above, most
people's first businesses will fail. That will obviously skew the numbers in
favour of failure: indeed, given that it's surprising the survival rates are
as high as they are.

You're correct that it's (sometimes) easier to build a successful business
after you've already built one. However, you don't mention the secondary
point, which is that it's also much easier to build a successful business
after you've already tried really hard and failed at one.

~~~
marcosdumay
> there's a significant difference between small business failure rates and
> small businessperson failure rates

Most people can not afford a failed business. If you are looking at repeated
tries, you are taking a huge amount of survivorship bias already.

~~~
thenomad
Depends on the business. Not everything requires huge or even significant
initial outlay.

For example, infoproducts (or any kind of digital product) are very cheap to
start up. They take time, but not necessarily a lot of money.

~~~
igk
The thing is, time is money. Leisure time is one privilege of the rich, or
lucky, which leads to unfair compounding advantages (like philosophy as well).
"Normal" people (as in, if you selected them at random) don't have the time to
learn the special skills required and also invest the time to develop the very
specific type of product you are talking about. So, in order to start a
business, you need to have a break. It can be getting lucky with your job, a
windfall, or just gambling some precious savings or time onto your idea. And
then, most of the time, it fails, and most people cannot afford to retry.
Those that manage anyway are the exception, not the rule

------
TheAlchemist
This one is also great:

[http://www.wisdomination.com/what-is-survivorship-
bias/](http://www.wisdomination.com/what-is-survivorship-bias/)

By far, the best explanation I've ever seen !

~~~
acdha
That link turns into a download, at least in Chrome.

~~~
markwaldron
I just opened it, also in Chrome, and it took me to the website

~~~
acdha
Unclear what's going on but I get an application/octet-stream which hangs
after the first ~23KB from both Chrome and Firefox. I'm assuming it's an issue
with a proxy on the network I'm using but it's definitely unusual.

------
crusso
Yes, working hard is not an absolute determiner of success. It may not even be
a majority determiner, depending upon your personal experiences or philosophy
as well as the domain in which you're trying to achieve success. Winning the
lottery is an absurdly extreme example of one domain where luck is provably a
majority determiner. It's funny as a comic, but that domain doesn't really map
onto many other career domains where hard work is a lot more important.

One thing is pretty certain, though. Doing nothing at all leads nothing at
all. If you don't get up out of bed, eat, do something - you die rather
quickly.

If you barely get out of bed to eat, but don't take care of yourself, you limp
along through life and probably die early from lack of proper nutrition,
exercise, and mental stimulation.

Somewhere along the spectrum from doing absolutely nothing to killing yourself
with work is a sweet spot for achieving success. My observation is that the
people who succeed spend more time on the side of that spectrum toward working
their tails off than on the side of doing nothing.

So yeah, it's a funny comic. It makes a point to remember, but it's definitely
not the final word on the value of hard work.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
"My observation is that the people who succeed spend more time on the side of
that spectrum toward working their tails off than on the side of doing
nothing."

My observation is those people are miserable, unhealthy and have poor
relationships.

~~~
crusso
Not true at all on the health side. These days, most of those people have
plenty of money for gym equipment at home, personal trainers, etc. and they
have the motivation to actually do exercise.

Relationships are hit and miss, in my experience. Some hard workers work hard
at their relationships too.

------
ookblah
Is luck an important part of success? Yes, I think we all agree, and probably
far more so than we give it credit for. But to hand wave it away is...
frustrating.

I've spent enough time in running a business to know that what works for one
person may or may not work for another. I too hate the hero worship that
surrounds the ultra successful, the whole "follow XYZ steps and you can be a
billionaire!" type stuff. You can extrapolate a lot of general guidelines to
help you increase your "luck", but nothing is guaranteed. I've seen friends
with good plans fail because they couldn't execute, due to things out of their
control or things I perceived as in their control. We've weathered some storms
through sheer luck and I'm thankful for that.

However, If you're already looking for excuses then you will most likely fail.
Every ambition or goal has a cost. If X% of startups or Y% of people who
pursue this succeed, there's obviously a luck component to it. But I bet that
the vast majority of that subset worked hard anyway and knew what they were
getting into. Failure was always a potential outcome.

I get frustrated by everyone who points to anyone who is finding success in
something as handwaving away their hard work and pointing to luck and
survivorship bias, as if they see through some illusion that nobody else is
aware of. That's bullshit. So you know what survivorship bias is? Good for
you, now what? Does this affect your life goals in any way? People just play
the hand they are dealt and come out better or worse. Nothing more, nothing
less.

~~~
skybrian
The comic exaggerates to make a point, but this isn't about black and white;
it's about shades of grey. It's about telling the story about what happened in
the right way, acknowledging luck as well as hard work, as you just did.
People complain when it's done in a simplistic way.

------
qq66
Like Bo Burnham said:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U)

~~~
leejo
When I saw the comic in my feeds this morning I immediately thought of Darius
Kazemi's XOXO talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw)

~~~
amsilprotag
I was reminded of that talk when I saw the comic, and surprised to see the
comments debating the influence of luck and effort in life outcomes.

Both media are making the same joke, but I don't think anyone would feel a
need to defend effort if they had seen the talk instead of the comic. The
talk's beat-for-beat parody of the just-so success story paints a very clear
and recognizable target.

~~~
leejo
Indeed, Darius makes this clear when he moves onto the more serious second
half of his talk: "... beyond a certain threshold of work that you put into
your projects, success is entirely out of your hands". You can substitute
"projects" and "success" for whatever you feel applies for your situation.

If anyone doesn't want to watch the entire video then just watch the last 39
seconds, it ties in nicely with the comic as Darius argues that talking about
"how to buy more lottery tickets" _is_ useful whereas "how to win the lottery"
is not.

------
hal9000xp
It's indeed worth to take survivorship bias into account.

But if you put too much emphasis on survivorship bias then you would think
that everything is completely random and use "survivorship bias" argument as
an excuse to do nothing.

I'm highly recommend to listen Peter Thiel's speech "You are not a lottery
ticket":

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZM_JmZdqCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZM_JmZdqCw)

~~~
jacquesm
Peter Thiel should be the last person on earth to argue against survivorship
bias, being an excellent example of it himself.

~~~
backpropaganda
Peter Thiel isn't arguing for startups here, but arguing against the idea that
the world is just coin flips and some people randomly end up with 10 heads. So
your comment is mostly ad hominem.

~~~
jacquesm
He can only argue for that with a platform _because_ he ended up with 10
heads. So no, it is not an ad hominem, it goes for anybody in that position,
but _also_ for Peter Thiel.

What's the last time you met a poor person giving seminars on the world not
just being coinflips?

You can improve the odds by hard work and trying to grasp whatever
opportunities come your way. But it would be a terrible mistake to assume that
that would lead to a specific outcome given the number of hidden variables.

~~~
vixen99
Poor people, focusing on survival, don't have the time and wherewithal to give
seminars.

~~~
jacquesm
I hear giving seminars pay really well.

Do those poor people have time enough to go to those seminars as audience?

------
tempodox
Humans just seem to be wired for cargo cult. If I make the same mistakes as
the one who got unreasonably lucky, I'll end up in the same improbable spot.

~~~
AJRF
What if we humans had a predisposition to "Cargo-Cult" in order to strive to
advance our race? Some sort of memetic gene. A sort of selfish gene if you
will.

People would argue striving to be like a TED speaker or Kim Kardashian or
(INSERT_CELEB_NAME_HERE) is superficial, dumb and shallow. Yet those people
are better positioned to survive given our society doesn't change.

I would be interested to see if their was some sort of Event that drastically
changed our world, would we worship hunter-gatherer style traits again?

I think yes.

~~~
rusk
Sounds like you're describing the distinction between Fiedler's _Task
Oriented_ vs _Relationship Oriented_ Leader at a sociological level, but we
can see these distinctions at organisational level already. Different orgs
favour different styles of leadership personality depending on what kind of
environment the org is operating in

    
    
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiedler_contingency_model
    

A yet more fine-grained model is provided by Vroom:

    
    
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vroom–Yetton_decision_model
    

It's horses for courses. Its as much about the leader suiting the org and
taking it where it needs to go, as it is about the org being led.

In your example, I'm taking "celebrities" as leaders; Kim Kardashian for
instance being "Relationship Oriented" and perhaps reflecting the desire of
her followers for maintaining stability and comfort.

The rougher, more "Hunter Gatherer" style traits, perhaps _channelled_ by
modern political personalities perhaps reflect followers who are in more
uncertain circumstances and who are looking for economic growth and an
stabilisation of their situation.

------
jimnotgym
This is half the issue, the other half I see in the UK all the time is
'businessmen', who have been set up in a small business by their family money
and the old boys network from their expensive school. Whenever you see
business networking events they seem to be dominated by these people, or
people in property.

I have had a lot of exposure to people 'in property'. People in property are
people who had access to capital at the right time. Even worse are those who
get to hear about government sell offs or developments which will increase
values in an area before the rest of the populace. Then of course there are
the money launderers. So I will add flexible morality to my list of traits
that make a millionaire.

------
skrebbel
If you like this comic, you'll appreciate Darius Kazemi's talk "How I Won The
Lottery".

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw)

------
swombat
To me, this seems mostly a very justified criticism of many startup advice
articles, and the reason why I wrote [https://danieltenner.com/2017/03/16/how-
to-write-good-startu...](https://danieltenner.com/2017/03/16/how-to-write-
good-startup-advice-articles/) a good long while ago...

------
treyfitty
I grew up relatively poor (I think my parents were on welfare at one point,
but they would never tell me). I studied hard in college, got a good job
afterwards, and now enjoy a very middle class life, which is rare considering
my many friends + acquaintances from the same upbringing are struggling.
Relatively speaking, I am "successful" all because I studied hard.

The details in between are important in the discourse of luck. Growing up
poor, I engaged in a lot of unethical behavior to acquire money. By some
miracle, I got admitted into college (albeit a state school), and realizing
this miracle, I dedicated my 4 years to pure studying with the belief that
good grades -> good job. At the end of junior year, I questioned this logic- I
had a 4.0 GPA, yet after 20 interviews, wasn't able to land an internship
(which falsely led me to believe I was relegated out of the realm of
"success"). Then, I digressed to my former self, and got in trouble with the
law. During senior year, after 20 more interviews, couldn't land a full-time
offer. Again, by luck, I somehow ended up landing a "prestigious" job. Years
later, it was revealed to me that the hiring committee all but unanimously
disagreed on my qualifications. One member read my senior thesis in full and,
for some inexplicable reason, fought for me, and I ended up receiving 1/40
slots reserved for Ivy League grads.

Whereas the first paragraph suggests hard work pays off, the second paragraph
screams "luck." Sometimes, the details are too long, where the key events
suffice when giving a description of someone's path. I don't think people are
trying to dupe listeners and self inflate their hard work when they make
statements like the first paragraph- people just spare the details because
it's really not _directly_ relevant to the narrative.

Since my first job, I've interviewed for 70 different roles without success.
While I get dejected at times, I understand the role of luck. I don't owe the
details- I've earned my right to say I worked hard, but people can, and always
do, aid in my luck. Without the awareness of this, I would've given up by now,
but I just keep chopping. That's all there is to it when it comes to
discussing luck.

~~~
cyberpunk
I think luck is a bit overstated there.

Sure, sometimes an opportunity appears through some random chance which later
on we might feel is lucky; if you were able to actually do that job, or
deliver on whatever chance appeared then luck did little more than open the
door.

If you're good enough, or hard working enough, a chance will usually appear.
Don't dismiss an achievement as just being "luck" \-- it was earned (I sure
did)..

You're lucky if you pick a winning lottery ticket. You do well on a job or a
opportunity? That's because you worked to be able to exploit the chance, not
because you got lucky to get offered it.

------
majani
I believe that success does largely depend on capitalizing on lucky breaks.
However, I also believe that each and every one of us gets lucky breaks. What
matters is can you spot lucky breaks,and when you do spot them, how do you
react? I think it's very possible to train yourself to have the awareness to
be able to analyze situations, recognize lucky breaks frequently and just run
with them. In a word, you could call this approach "opportunism."

~~~
lotsofpulp
>However, I also believe that each and every one of us gets lucky breaks.

Why do you assume this?

~~~
e12e
Everyone experience change. Not all change is bad, _some_ change is good. This
would be sufficient for "everyone experience lucky breaks" to be true.

Sometimes a change can be terrible and good. Whole family dead, house gone?
Terrible. Being free to move to a new area, perhaps find new opportunity -
could be (in a different sense) good.

Only a crazy person would _want_ such a disaster, but sometimes surviving
something like that if one is able to shamble on through life - will in
hindsight be the point were life changed, in some ways, for the better.

~~~
reallydontask
I don't doubt for a second that everybody gets lucky breaks.

There is an issue of magnitude of those breaks, though

------
infinity0
What else would you do instead? More often than not I see this point abused by
lazy or negative people to justify not doing anything useful.

Yes there's survivorship bias, you try to adjust for that, and draw
inspiration from the positive parts of the better and more realistic examples.

Just because the system is rigged against you, doesn't mean you shouldn't try
to achieve things. Not trying to achieve things is decidedly worse.

~~~
hueving
>What else would you do instead?

Acknowledge when luck was the major reason for your success. Don't stand in
front of a room of people and tell them if they weren't so damn lazy, they
could have hundreds of millions of dollars as well.

In other words, if luck played any major part in your success, you really have
no justification in lecturing people on how to be good at something.

~~~
mseebach
While luck will definitely have played a non-trivial role in any meaningful
"made it" success story, it's equally disingenuous to ascribe success to luck
_alone_. Never leaving your comfort zone, never taking a chance, never
accepting that improving yourself will often require hard work and real
sacrifice and never venturing out into the world all but guarantees that you
will never get lucky. Casually explaining away all success as random luck is
also pretty likely to ensure that it will never happen.

No, theres no silver bullet, especially not in small/easy/silly lifestyle
variations (meditation, eating granola, not having furniture etc), but then
that's far from what most inspirational business stories are about.

~~~
crusso
That's the same point I tried to make in another comment. Of course luck plays
a role to some degree. But this obsession over luck as the key to the success
of others seems unhealthy to me. Just from my position as a person approaching
50, it seems that it's an obsession that dominates more in the upcoming
generations than in ones past where the mantra that "hard work leads to
success" was a lot more common.

Once you take on the mindset that all success is luck, what's the motivation
for trying at all?

------
lukego
"Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole
working life into a few years."

~~~
adrianN
Most people end up with less money when they retire than before they started
working?

------
yhavr
What this bias really tells us that knowledge about failures and how to
prevent them is even more important that steps to success. Yes, the world is
completely random, and suppose it's like dice throwing. So to maximise your
profit, you need to stick to two simple rules: \- Make sure that next throw
doesn't wipe your out of the game. \- Maximize number of attempts per unit of
time.

The belief that success is completely luck-based is useless, unless there's a
uniform distribution of 'success' over all types of people and their
strategies. That is, even if I leave my job now without any verified product,
I have the same chances to establish a profitable business, then a guy who
already has paying customers.

------
stdio_h
Just saw this similar comic! [http://smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=4283](http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=4283)

------
brlewis
The cartoon is good, but the alt text is better.

------
FrankenPC
To me, a lot of success is knowing when to give up and make a tangential
change. Many failures I've come across were stubborn people who refused to let
it go and try something different. But then again, you might let go and
someone else will pick up the ball and make a million. You are back to
gambling.

------
mogigoma
That comic strip is similar to the talk Tiny Subversions by Darius Kazemi at
the 2014 XOXO Festival:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw)

------
synthmeat
There's a typo in mouseover caption - _defeatest_. Or is it an extra layer of
juicy joke I'm not getting?

------
Viz4ps
For every major success story there will be thousands of failures you don't
hear about.

------
amai
Does "not surviving" generate a Non-Survivorship Bias ?

------
vog
That's strange. Such a huge discussion here on HN, but very few explaination
and discussion on ExplainXKCD:

[http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1827](http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1827)

Is this because people prefer discussion threads over collaborating in a wiki,
or is this because ExplainXKCD is not as widely known as it should be?

~~~
aaron695
ExplainXKCD has lost the plot, which is a shame it was quite good.

------
skarap
Meta: I can't believe how often xkcd nails it.

~~~
tempodox
I suspect that others could nail it just as often but lack the ability to
present the conclusion in a way that's both succinct and palatable. Holding
the mirror up to people and surviving the act is a delicate art.

~~~
jacquesm
Also, that niche appears to be taken.

------
kebman
Survivorship? Is that the ship that survives? I just call it survivor bias.
But then, that's just me. :D

~~~
leipert
> word-forming element meaning "quality, condition; act, power, skill; office,
> position; relation between, [...] from Old English -sciepe" [1]

It seems like -ship is related to the German -schaft. e.g. Gemeinschaft <->
fellowship, Gesellschaft <-> companionship, Freundschaft <-> friendship ...

Thanks for letting me search for it. Now I learned something on a slow friday.

[1]
[http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ship](http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=-ship)

~~~
sudoyou1
You are correct. It also gets more similar in Dutch: "-schap"

Gemeinschaft -> gemeenschap Freundschaft -> vriendschap Gesellschaft ->
gezelschap

But in the case of "survivorship", the German equivalent doesn't include
"-schaft". It sounds awkward. Probably in Dutch as well.

