We believe a lot of foolish things to be true. Trust me I am a hypnotist, I know!
Sometimes though, the silly things we believe are good for us. I want to talk about one particular delusion that can help us in life.
Perhaps you have heard of success bias or survivor bias before? The basic idea is that if we have done well at something then it is because we are better at that thing than other people.
To get you to where I’m going with this we need to take a small detour. I want to tell you about an infamous story.
During World War II the British Royal Air Force noticed that a bunch of planes were coming back with holes punched in them from enemy fire. They catalogued where the most holes were and it looked something like this:
We believe a lot of foolish things to be true. Trust me I am a hypnotist, I know!
Sometimes though, the silly things we believe are good for us. I want to talk about one particular delusion that can help us in life.
Perhaps you have heard of success bias or survivor bias before? The basic idea is that if we have done well at something then it is because we are better at that thing than other people.
To get you to where I’m going with this we need to take a small detour. I want to tell you about an infamous story.
During World War II the British Royal Air Force noticed that a bunch of planes were coming back with holes punched in them from enemy fire. They catalogued where the most holes were and it looked something like this:
(image courtesy of Wikipedia)
They wanted to improve the survivability of their planes but could not afford to add much weight. So they concluded that the places most damaged needed to be reinforced and protected.
This is a case of survivor bias because they only focused on the winners, the planes that survived. Planes that were hit anywhere else tended to crash and therefore not make it back to be examined.
It turns out they were reinforcing exactly the wrong parts of the planes.
We make this mistake all the time, especially when we are looking at ourselves. We look only at success and not at failure. We look at the people who have made it in life and ignore all the people who are just as talented and hard working who haven’t.
For example, astronauts; In 2019 NASA had over 18,000 applicants who were all hard-working, skilled, and passionate people. NASA selected 11!
If you interviewed those few successful applicants, they would almost certainly attribute their success to their hard work, to the drive to succeed at an early age, to a love of mathematics or space that was encouraged by a mentor or parents. That they just got lucky is not something that would ever cross their mind.
And fair enough, if you have worked hard for something and you get that thing it is natural to assume that you got that thing because you worked hard and were talented!
But what about all the other, unsuccessful applicants who worked just as, if not harder, or even, what about the people who grew up in poorer neighbourhoods and couldn’t afford to take time off work to apply for the role?
No-one gets to be an astronaut without being lucky…
The converse of this is also true, when we fail at something we tend to believe that it is because we are somehow less worthy, that we didn’t deserve it. Certainly the people who succeeded, who made it to the top have a tendency to believe that we just aren’t as ‘good’ or ‘competent’ as them.
Essentially, we like to believe that we succeed or fail based on our own personal qualities. We have a tendency to ignore external factors (also known as ‘luck’) and to believe that it was all us.
This is a stupid thing to believe, but it is also a useful thing to believe. If we truly thought that it was all just random chance then there would be no point in even trying. It would demotivate us to the point that we would remove any chance of our own success.
We all know someone who hasn’t accepted the delusion, perhaps it is you? Knowing that there are a bunch of talented and hard working individuals out there who are competing with you prevents you from even trying.
Well, you have to try to succeed but more importantly you have to keep trying when you fail!
You have to act as if it all comes down to your personal qualities and efforts. At the same time, win or lose, it is vital to accept the role that luck plays in the process.
A final thought: numerous psychological experiments have shown us that people who chalk their success up to external factors, who essentially feel like they got lucky, are judged as being far more likeable than people who say that they got where they did through their own hard work.
