Survivorship in Career Advice

Career advice from successful people is almost entirely survivorship bias. A billionaire entrepreneur tells you to drop out and follow your passion. What you do not hear are the thousands who did exactly that and went bankrupt. The advice reflects one outcome, not the odds.

The pattern repeats everywhere. Published authors tell aspiring writers to persist and never give up. But for every author who persisted to success, many more persisted to exhaustion and never published. The survivors write memoirs; the casualties do not.