We love successful people, and we love trying to learn from and copy them, to try and understand the qualities that few of their success.
Steve Jobs, for example, many of his biographers highlight his passionate temper as being one of the factors in Apple's success.
Or, take Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, neither of whom finished university, the fact that has attracted a lot of admiration in the media.
But trying to learn from and copy the successful can be dangerous, and it comes down to something called "survivorship bias".
One of the most famous examples of survivorship bias in action was during World War Ⅱ, when a statistician named Abraham Walt was asked to study how best to protect airplanes from being shot down.
At first, the approach of his research group had been to look at the planes coming back, see where they were hit the worst, and then reinforced those areas.
Walt, however, realized this approach missed a valuable part of the picture — the planes that were hit but that hadn't made it back.
The planes they were looking at were just the survivors.
The bullet holes they were looking at actually indicated the area as a plane could be hit and keep flying.
These were exactly the areas that didn't need reinforcing.
