Comment by redelbee

I too have survivorship bias that I try to explain away with self serving theories and ideas that pit my special nature against the tendencies of the inferior masses. In my case I literally survived alcoholism after I was lucky enough to come out alive after an accident. I used this as motivation to do the hard work of getting and staying sober. My brain sometimes tells me that I have some special power of “working hard enough to change myself” that has also helped me become an entrepreneur and make other positive changes in my life. I tell myself people sometimes fail because they didn’t go through this and can’t work hard enough to change themselves for the better. In reality it all comes down to luck and circumstance that I was fortunate enough to take advantage of.

In this post the author tries to set up an unassailable scenario where two very similar people end up with strikingly different life outcomes because of “how some of us have chosen to live their lives.” Conveniently, the author is the successful one because he is part of “a small set of humans who don’t act like their lives are predestined.” The majority, and the person he compares himself to, obviously couldn’t succeed without this special character aspect. In reality, it’s the “small set of humans” part that shows the way to the truth. The analysis that says successful people are different because they chose to act differently and not live a “predestined” life ignores all the people who also made that choice without getting lucky and achieving success. It also leaves out the people who lived a “predestined” life and succeeded despite their lack of willpower or special abilities or whatever else we can point to as an explanation.

Like I said, I am victim to the same fallacies in my own reasoning about my life, but I try very hard to overcome them or at least recognize them. The takeaway from this article isn’t that “you are the master of your own fate” but instead something like “be careful when trying to explain your own life’s circumstances, especially when your explanations put you in some special class that only few people have achieved.” Luck, by its very nature, is only for the few.