The big lesson of survivor bias is that you should optimize for being a survivor.
You can’t win if you lose – so learn to not lose.
Most major failure conditions are avoidable with a little bit of foresight, planning, study and so on. Analyze failures and take conscientious steps to avoid them.
From my reading and conversations over the years, I get the sense that most businesses fail because most (more than half of) businesses seem to be started by people who don’t do any due diligence. For example, using your life savings to start a restaurant without ever having worked in one, or even read about the specifics of the struggles involved. Being able to make a nice meal for your friends doesn’t mean you’ll be able to run a professional kitchen, and even if you could, it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do the marketing to get people in the door, handle the relationships with your suppliers, and so on.
Failures are inevitable, but the trick is that you can fail early or fail late. You want to isolate your failures as early as possible. Do 100 pitches. You likely won’t even get that far.
Try to fail (intelligently) as much as possible, as cheaply as possible, as early as possible. You learn what’s right by eliminating everything that’s wrong. You can generally can do that a lot faster and a lot cheaper than people seem to assume.
Then, when you win, after decades of putting in the work, and more importantly, avoiding the big open pits in the ground that everyone around you keeps falling into, they’ll say, “Well, it’s survivor bias.” 😅
— don’t break your ankles —
there are some contexts where directness is the best move. eg when you’re in an emergency. there are other contexts though where obliqueness is a better strategy. eg when being direct makes you a target for retaliation. I’ve had interesting disagreements w friends abt this before
“target for retaliation” is not necessarily a bad thing either. especially in a trusted relationship, you want to have that back and forth. conflict is healthy. but in certain ‘dark forest’ type contexts you can’t know how big or bad or disproportionate the retaliation is gonna be
there are situations in which being direct is going to trigger a retaliation event so large that it’ll basically “kill” you or “take you out of the game”, and this then limits the influence that you can have towards the outcome you want
you might think, fuck that, I don’t want to play a game at all if I have to be oblique to achieve my goals, I quit. fair enough, that’s a valid choice, own it if you choose it
what has been tiresome for me to witness over the years is when people get in over their heads after doing dramatic gestures and then quitting because they couldn’t take the heat of the retaliation that was, to me, clearly foreseeable
It’s like watching people repeatedly jump from the window and break their ankles, instead of simply taking the stairs. and then now you’re out of the game. because, what, you thought the stairs were for sissies or chumps or something? But now you can’t even play.
I don’t even really care about the stairs vs window debate, or what you think a sissy or a chump is, or what weird issue you might have had with your dad or teacher that makes you think jumping out the window is smart. I mostly just wanna see people play
stop jumping out of windows and then breaking your ankles. if you know you got some parkour skills or whatever then go ahead. I don’t care how you do it. Just think a little bit about how you would respond to how others might respond to what you do
I get ahead of some of my peers in life just by not breaking my ankles. And I don’t even want to be ahead, I want us all to rise together and uplift the next generation and– you broke your ankles again? Ffs
No offense to the brittle bone community – in fact I bet you guys are even more judicious and careful and deliberate because you’re cognizant of the risks and I respect that deeply
“think 3 steps ahead so you can be public-facing without breaking your ankles” I think might be maybe an example of a prime number maze
(1) what do you want to do, (2) how will people respond to that, (3) how will you respond to how people respond to that
you can go in the reverse direction too
(1) what do you wanna do
(2) why do you wanna do it
(3) are there any more elegant or effective paths to addressing (2)
simple dynamism, or I just like to call it “thinking”
but you don’t spend too long thinking; you have limited time and resources so think long enough to give you a fairly confident path of action, sanity-check against catastrophic failure, then act as survivably as you can. Again, all you need to do is not break your ankles
–
related: the folly of the plunge (2016)