We love hearing stories about successful people, how did they do it. We hope that we can repeat these habits and reap the same benefits. However, there’s no certainty that if we do what they did, we’ll have the same rewards.
We tend to ignore all the unsuccessful people and focus on the ones that achieved it. Nevertheless, if you think about it there are many other factors that influenced their rise to the top. Could it be that they were from a well-off family and got a “small loan of one million dollars”? Maybe they just got lucky and were at the right place at the right time? Maybe they’re just higher risk takers overall, as a state of mind?
Survivorship Bias as defined in Wikipedia is “the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility”. Which basically means that the survivors tell the stories, but we actually ignore the failures. The reason why they’re successful as mentioned above may not be the reason they’re saying it is. They themselves are might be unaware of it.
We can learn much more when we start comparing successful people with the ones that failed. Not just the successful versus the successful. Why did the 100 individuals with similar skills as the single successful person didn’t become rich? If we can see the difference, this can be very informative and helpful. However, if we compared 100 successful people to each other we will usually not get that much useful information.
There are a lot of articles regarding this concept and books written about it. I’d highly recommend having a look at this article for starters.
Also, the video below illustrates this bias brilliantly in 4 minutes.