Writing Excuses 8.34: Survivorship Bias

When people who have succeeded at a given endeavor speak about their success, we are inclined to listen because hey, we'd like to succeed there as well. It's critical to recognize the bias here. Survivorship bias is the skewing of the data that occurs when you examine and seek to emulate successes without considering failures in that same space. Here at Writing Excuses we suffer from it. So in this podcast we'll talk about the places in which our experiences may just not apply to you because we got lucky. Sure, there are things we've done right, and clearly in some cases we've been able to exploit good fortune to our advantage, but in this episode we'll focus on the non-reproducible aspects of our own success with an eye toward helping you to focus your own efforts on the things that actually matter. The Liner Notes We Keep Promising You: Here is Tobias Buckell's post on Survivorship Bias (note: contains strong language) Word of the Week: "Rothfussian," which means "writing something so awesome on your first go that success cannot be denied to you."