People enjoy listening to successful people explain how they were able to achieve the things that they’ve accomplished. (I should know, I often interview them). Unfortunately, a lot of advice from successful people is absolutely terrible. It fails to take into account the thousands and thousands of other people who “dedicated their life to their passion,” “sacrificed everything to make themselves better,” “did a great job and focused on their product,” and “pushed themselves to work harder every day.” When we only focus on those who made it, this is called “survivorship bias” and it leads to some pretty unfortunate errors and, particularly in athletics and business, a toxic form of magical thinking. Cut it out!

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