Imagine there’s a world war raging, a war being fought in part in the skies with fighter jets and warplanes. In this imaginary war, you’re in charge of fortifying the planes to ensure the flight missions' efficacy and the pilots' safety. As it happens, your enemies also have fighter jets and warplanes, as well as land spotters who would stop at nothing to shoot down your planes. Unfortunately, they succeed on occasion, so that a significant number of your planes fail to make it back to your air base. All is not lost though, because a good number of them do make it back, most of them bearing the brunt of the assault in the form of bullet holes from enemy fire.
This is where it gets…interesting. As part of your fortification efforts, you and your team embark on a new initiative to gather the data these bullet holes provide. You study the locations and distribution of the bullet holes across the body of the planes that make it back to base, and you find that the bullet holes are not evenly distributed across the body of the planes, but are rather concentrated around certain parts.
Based on the evidence, there’s a clear course of action, as your team suggests. The question which lies before you is this: should you act on your team’s suggestion, and reinforce the parts of the planes where the bullet holes are concentrated, or should you opt for a different course of action?
You examine the choices before you and you see that your team’s suggestion to add armour to the bullet-ridden parts of the planes is based on the premise that reinforcing these parts would increase the chances of more planes withstanding enemy fire and returning to base.
This makes sense, right? Right?
Well, if you’re the Hungarian statistician, Abraham Wald, then, no, this doesn’t make sense. Wald was part of the Statistical Research Group which contributed to the Allied military efforts during World War 2, and when faced with the seemingly-intuitive decision to protect the parts of the surviving planes with visible bullet holes, he went the other way. His recommendation to the military to reinforce the parts of the planes without bullet holes didn’t make sense at first, until he explained that the bullet holes in the surviving planes represented the areas where the planes could take on enemy fire and still successfully return to base. Therefore, the parts of the planes without the bullet holes were the most sensitive, inferring that planes hit in those areas were more likely to go down on the battlefield. In other words, the absence of visible evidence of bullet holes in certain parts of the returning planes suggested that those were precisely the areas that required the most reinforcement.
Wald’s contemporaries didn’t know it then, but he had prevented them from falling prey to what we now know as survivorship bias, which is what happens when our focus on entities that have passed or met certain criteria at the expense of all the others that haven’t, leads us to incorrect or fallacious conclusions. In other words, by zooming in on a select few data points, thus overlooking the entire data set, our incomplete data leads us to act against our best interests.
This phenomenon isn’t confined to statistical and military pursuits. In fact, it permeates all aspects of our lives, from corporate careers to brand origin stories, and germane to our interests on this blog, creative ventures. How many times have you heard the origin stories of brands like Starbucks or public figures like Bill Gates, often replete with learnings and strategies on how they became as successful and popular as they are? The moral or overarching narrative is almost always along the lines of: (1) here’s what this successful person or brand or company has done, (2) if you’d like to be like this successful person or brand or company, follow in their footsteps. With so much emphasis on success in corporate life, wealth creation and individual freedom in today’s society, is it any surprise the biographies and memoirs of celebrities and politicians are as popular as ever? Whether it’s Elon Musk’s and Steve Jobs’ biographies, or Michelle Obama’s and Nelson Mandela’s memoirs, or books about the success strategies of household names like Amazon, there are entire subgenres that have risen in prevalence over the last few decades, all dedicated to telling and retelling success stories.
I have no doubt there’s much to learn from these stories, but what they fail to account for are all the other failed brands, companies, and individuals who knowingly or unknowingly adopted positions and strategies similar to those of the acclaimed and much-vaunted protagonists of those success stories. This is crucial, because we rarely get to hear the stories of those who failed, and when we come across those stories, we’re less likely to give them more than a moment’s thought. For every Starbucks success story, there are at least a dozen failed coffee shop franchises, and for every Harvard University dropout to multi-billionaire story (think Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg), there are countless other dropouts we’ve never heard of.
When we jump to the conclusion that the key to building one of the largest coffee shop franchises is aggressive marketing and expansion because it worked for Starbucks, we fail to consider all the others who adopted similar strategies, and we do so at our peril. Similarly, when we jump to the conclusion that the key to founding the next Microsoft or Facebook (or insert your global tech company of choice) is to enrol in an Ivy League university and drop out after a few semesters, we might be setting ourselves up for a world of hurt. Starbucks’ aggressive marketing and expansion strategies may well have contributed to the company’s success. Similarly, it is possible that if Gates and Zuckerburg didn’t drop out of Harvard when they did, Microsoft and Facebook may not exist or may exist as shadows of themselves. That said, these are possibilities, not certainties, and these in isolation do not account for the many more factors, decisions, and events that led to their eventual success.
There are infinite possibilities and combinations of factors that have resulted in the success of the entities we see today, from Starbucks to Microsoft to whatever creative journey you find yourself on. Keep this in mind the next time someone tries to sell you a tried and tested approach or a proven path to success in your art, because while you can learn from others’ mistakes and even successfully emulate others’ approaches on occasion, it behoves you to remember that ultimately, your journey is your own.
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.