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“He did it, I can do it too” – successful experience inspires confidence, and we change lives. Everything is fine, but only until the first failure. It’s not about us, but about the stories themselves – they inspire, but in practice they often create obstacles in achieving their dreams.
Bookstores are filled with publications like How to Learn 30 Foreign Languages in Six Months, How to Write a Book in 3 Months, and How to Lose 20 Kg Without Diets and Sports. We buy them by the ton, hoping to change our lives as well. But it doesn’t work out that way. The percentage of readers who actually apply someone else’s successful experience is negligible. Let’s find out why.
Famous happy ending
Books are written by successful people – no one would think to buy the story of a loser. The catch is that a pre-known positive outcome distorts the situation. The difficulties and deprivations that the main character overcomes seem natural – no one promised that it would be easy. The idea that you have to suffer in order to succeed has become familiar to us.
Ang Lee, the director of Life of Pi, struggled for six years before making his way into film. Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel García Márquez pledged his family property to finish writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. Even Richard Branson, one of Britain’s richest men, had a string of setbacks in his youth: his businesses were unprofitable and created problems with the law.
These stories confirm the popular belief that you have to work hard and suffer to achieve results. The path to the goal is always thorny, but life will surely reward you for your efforts. Within the framework of the success story, everything is justified: abandoned studies, divorce from his wife, poor health.
When we ourselves become the heroes of such stories, everything looks different. Nobody guarantees a happy ending. Every day in poverty and uncertainty: “And if I die poor and not famous? I could sit quietly in the office, shift papers … “
These thoughts can be driven away from oneself and pushed into the farthest corner of consciousness. But until you achieve real results, doubts will live on. As in trading on the markets of the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange: you look at the charts for the past years – and it seems obvious at what point it was necessary to buy and when to sell. It is a pity that in the present it is impossible to call a graph from the future and find out what to do. You also can’t be sure that a series of failures will necessarily lead to success, as happens in the books.
Cumulative Changes
People with different experiences follow the same path in different ways. Stories from the category “I couldn’t lose weight for a long time, I tried a bunch of diets, and only this one gave a result” or “I searched for myself for many years until I came across a book that turned my life upside down” convince that a turning point is needed to achieve success. We pay attention to it, underestimating the significance of the previous ones.
Neil Donald Walsh, best-selling author of Conversations with God, has experienced a series of horrific events: being fired from his job, a fire, a broken family, a car accident. Tragedy changed Walsh’s life, and he soon wrote a book of wisdom. We see only sad events, but do not know the main thing. Neal had been interested in religion since childhood and studied theology for many years. Writing a book is natural for him. But it seems to us that it was the tragedy that changed the author.
Focusing on one event is good for the plot and bad for the reader. A book that has become a revelation and turned the life of one person upside down may seem mediocre to another. The second reader does not have the life experience that the first person had. The same is true for fateful events. The famous director in the cafe noticed the waitress and turned her into a superstar. We wish the same would happen to us. But once in the place of the lucky one, we get completely different results. You need to remember this.
Survivor’s mistake
In statistics there is a term – “survivor error”. If the sample for the study is compiled incorrectly, the conclusions will also be erroneous. During the Second World War, experts studied the damage to bombers returning from combat points. The most vulnerable places are the wings and tail. Obviously, these places need to be strengthened. Hungarian mathematician Abraham Wald kept his colleagues from making the wrong decision: aircraft that received “incompatible with life” damage did not return from the battlefield. Misnamed vulnerabilities are the strongest. Even with damage to the wings and tail, the planes returned home.
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The survivor’s error is most common in business education. We are taught how to manage a business by the example of successful companies, although it is more useful to study the activities of “sunken” competitors. Even if at some point in time the company’s strategy proved effective, this does not mean that it will remain the same in the future.
Blackberry communicators in the mid-2000s seemed revolutionary. The manufacturer focused on data security, comfortable typing, long battery life – and did not lose. A few years later, Blackberries began to lose to iPhones and Android-based smartphones. Blackberry developers didn’t expect consumers to prefer large touch screens over reliable batteries, and didn’t have time to adjust. For 5 years, the company has lost 75% of its market value.
According to the Association of Young Entrepreneurs of Russia, 90% of new companies are closed in the first 2-3 years of operation. A novice entrepreneur does not pay attention to statistics. Instead, he concentrates on examples in which circumstances work out for the best. The entrepreneur has an inadequate idea of the likelihood of success.
False memories
Wrong forecasts are half the trouble. Worse, the author embellished reality. Not intentionally. Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, proved in his book Stumbling on Happiness that people misremember the past. First, events are not imprinted in memory once and for all, like a record on film. Memories, like a puzzle, each time folded in the head anew. If we learn something later, it can also become part of the memory without us noticing.
Secondly, it is easier for a person to accept a specific, albeit difficult, situation than uncertainty. Daniel Gilbert talks about people who called “the best event in their lives” such situations as an unfair trial, public humiliation or the loss of the ability to move independently. It turns out that memories distort not only the facts, but also the emotional perception of the situation.
Probably, the heroes really learned from the hardships and revised their outlook on life. But the memories of those events do not adequately reflect the real reactions of people at these moments. We read the stories of those who quit a job they hated, started a business, traveled around the world, and get inspired by their emotions. But if we follow their example, things will be different. They wrote books when they were already successful. These are different emotions.
If you want to know how a bankrupt businessman feels, an artist from whom no one buys paintings, or a writer who received a devastating review of a novel of a lifetime, look no further for those who have ever experienced this. Look for those who are experiencing this right now.
Luck underestimation
We are accustomed to sing the role of perseverance and diligence. But scientific research proves that this is not enough for success. Daniel Kanneman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, analyzed the statistics and found that the forecasts of mediocre stock brokers are not inferior to those of outstanding specialists. “You reward employees simply for being lucky,” Daniel announced to brokerage firm executives.
The same is true for “brilliant” top managers and “high-performing” business models. Using statistical analysis of data, Kanneman opened his eyes to the mechanisms of success: we tend to overestimate the importance of the individual and underestimate the role of elementary luck.
Benefiting
Blindly following other people’s stories is dangerous and unwise. But throwing books of successful people out of the library is not worth it either. With the right critical approach, stories can be useful. The following tips will help you develop a critical attitude:
- Get ready for the unknown. Unlike movies and books, life does not stop at the moment of success or failure. Any of the events can result in unexpected consequences.
- Be realistic about your chances. Whether you’re writing a book or starting a business, find the statistics. Find out what percentage of these businesses are successful.
- Allocate more resources. Intuitively, we always imagine ideal scenarios. In practice, it takes twice as much time, money and other resources.
- Analyze comprehensively. If you think that someone is very lucky, take a closer look. There can be a lot of invisible work behind success.
- Study bad examples. How successful people and companies work, we are told from all sides. Pay attention to those who have failed. Perhaps their actions were slightly different.
See more at “Big plans”.