You Only See the Winners

For every successful dropout entrepreneur, there are thousands who dropped out and failed quietly. For every person who "followed their passion" and made it work, many more ended up broke. You do not hear about them because failure is invisible. Survivorship bias means drawing conclusions from the visible survivors while ignoring the invisible majority who did the same thing and did not make it.

This matters when you take advice from successful people. Their advice might be genuinely useful — or it might be the one thing that happened to work for them in a sea of randomness. Always ask: "How many people tried this same approach and failed?" The answer changes the lesson completely.