The Success Secret

 

This small article is about a hot topic that has many discussions in the current world "The way to success".

For the last few months, I skip several books that talk about different topics (most of them have many recommendations and are labeled as "best-selling in XXXX"), there are multi reasons that make me decide to skip them like poor writing skills, filling the book with random things not related to the book topic ... etc., one of them is the authors used annoying patterns for me, he just throws some talk to you like it's known facts, these facts aren't based on experiment or proven knowledge, only based on the author's POV and many of times this POV is based on things like "Survivorship bias (or survivor bias)" and "The holy success"

Survivorship bias

This term means looking only at the survivors instead of looking at the whole group, this bias is one of the most famous reasons that result in false results on the surveys, and beliefs and result in wrong decisions in the future.

Many speakers marketing their self by the mention "X attended my courses" or "There are Y people who attended then became successful persons", They never mention the thousands who attends then had trouble failing.

I remember a few years ago one of the lecturers (I love to hear) said that if you pick a random group (with the same ideology and business) most of the time it will have about the same distribution of success and failure as a group attends to the "success course".

That doesn't mean success is totally just a random thing or that self-improvement is a myth, what I want to say is doing x to improve y is a relationship that needs a lot of experiments and surveys to prove it, not a random guy told you it is proven to be true because he believes that or he tried it.

It worked for me

Sometimes experiments to measure the relation between two variables consume millions of dollars and much time, the most critical thing in most of these experiments is not the measurement process, it's how to find out all other variables that could affect this relationship and make sure they will not change during the experiment, even after doing this step they need to repeat the experiment multi-time to make sure the result will be the same.

It's a foolish idea that a single experiment is enough after said the new facts the author will face many cases that said this isn't true fact, and the answer is known to the author "That's because they didn't do it in the right way" that "right way" will be nothing like clear steps or set of rules it will be just bunch of words in the author's mind and probably each time asked about it will say the cloudy answer that no one will understand the exact meaning with the sentence "if you understand what I said you will succeed".

This point isn't against sharing the self-improvement experiment but tying the action with results is something that isn't reliable, imagine someone trained for 4 years and before the Olympiad, he had an accident and result he couldn't contest does that mean all that he did was wrong? imagine a person who did nothing in his entire life except sleep, eat, and play however he managed to gain millions from his rich father, does that mean doing the same will make you gain millions?

The survey approval

While there are many times you hear someone talk about a survey that no matter how much you search you will never find, there are other types of a survey when the details of that survey (like the selected groups, units, other variables ...etc.) you can't find, it's an easy thing to go to a school for rich families and go out with a survey that said the average pocket money for school student is 100$ per day, or go to a village where most women don't work and said that men have 30K$ more salary than women.

The one who does the survey is human which means he/she can be biased, lair, or stupid, normally that applies also to organizations, even when someone wants to get the truth, some things could affect the result without noticing, and the same people can answer the same questions different answer based on the order of questions, writing format, environment, time ... etc.

The holy success packages

When talking about success many people have a really strong bias toward the survivors, which results in many cases following each step of them without thinking about if it's logical or not, if someone does x,y,z and became the most successful person in the people's POV, most of them will just think let's do x,y,z regards if x,y,z is good or bad.

For them, it's an illegal thing to think x was a minor factor of success while y does not, and z was the most critical factor in the process.

I am not saying that I know the success way All I want to say is if success was an easy thing that anyone can achieve through reading a book that has a bad writing style then it will be different than success in my mind.

the image reference : [https://kenzie.snhu.edu/blog/what-is-success/]