Apple founder Steve Jobs, Google founder Bill Gates, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have all dropped out of college and started their own businesses with great success.
As a result, survivorship bias works here, and people tend to have the image that they can succeed even if they drop out of college. But this only makes them famous all over the world because they are really successful, and they miss the fact that many people actually drop out of college and fail. ..
According to one survey, 94% of the exceptionally successful business people in the United States are college graduates. Therefore, the hypothesis that you can succeed without a degree is an example of survivorship bias.
Employing a successful business model
Recently, there are many books and blogs by successful people, such as XX business model and tips for success in XX. Many would think that just imitating these would really succeed. Evidence of this is that books and blogs on the subject of such success models tend to gain popularity.
However, in reality, it is not possible to succeed simply by imitating this success model. Rather, if you stick to this success model, you will miss other important factors in your business, such as actual market conditions and demand, making it harder to succeed.
When doing business, it’s important to learn from the people who actually succeed, but if you stick to it, it can be the cause of failure. Therefore, it is important not to be fooled by survivorship bias and sometimes to refer to failure cases.
Advice from successful people
Freelance is increasing in Japan recently. When you’re considering becoming a freelancer, you may want to talk to an acquaintance who is actually working as a freelancer.
At that time, when I talked to a surviving person as a freelancer and said, “Freelance is recommended,” and swallowing it is a survivorship bias.
If you’re only listening to the experiences of successful people, you can’t hear any positive freelance stories. Therefore, you may easily think that “freelance is also good”.
However, “free lance’m recommend” the other words ” in my free lance had been facing,” it means that, does not mean that it is always facing you too.
And we need to not only listen to the successes, but also the experiences of the failure. By listening to the stories of people who have had various experiences, you will be able to make correct decisions without being affected by survivorship bias.
Asset Management
When advertising asset management, securities companies sometimes make attractive advertising complaints such as “The average yield of 10 investment trusts is 30%.” Many people will consider investing because the average yield in this ad is 30%.
However, here we have to think about what the number “average yield is 30%” is calculated based on. “The average yield is 30%” is the average of 10 investment trusts, but there may have been many other investment trusts that were dissolved. In reality, there are 50 investment trusts, and it is possible that only 10 of them with good results are calculated.
In this way, survivorship bias can also make the content of your ad more convenient for your company. Therefore, when investing, it is necessary for each person to thoroughly investigate the actual investment performance, not just the wording of the advertisement.
Where to work
Survivorship bias can also have an impact on employment. Foreign-affiliated companies are gaining popularity among job hunters. This is because the salaries of foreign-affiliated companies are higher than those of domestic companies.
However, the reason why foreign-affiliated companies have high salaries is that competition within the company is fierce and they cannot survive without the ability to be promoted. This is the reason why many foreign-affiliated companies have retired.
And the salary of foreign-affiliated companies is the salary level of excellent employees who can survive in foreign-affiliated companies. If this includes the salaries of retirees who couldn’t survive in a foreign company, the salaries would actually drop significantly. Therefore, even if you actually get a job at a foreign-affiliated company, you may not get the salary you expected.
Diet advertising
You will often see diet advertisements on TV and magazines. And as a result, there are some pretty positive things like weight loss of 10 kg on average and waist 8 cm minus.
However, these results only show the results of successful people, not the number of people who have failed their diet. In fact, some people may not have lost weight at all after using diet foods and supplements, or rather they may have gained weight.
However, because the advertisement does not include the number of failures, it is said that diet foods and supplements are excellent products. In order to make a product look good in this way, the information presented is often derived solely from the biased facts.