Aus Fehlern lernen, das wird häufig propagiert. Nur wenn man sich umschaut, es wird vergleichsweise selten darüber berichtet. Stattdessen stehen doch eher die Erfolgsgeschichten im Vordergrund. Das ist ein großer Fehler, findet David McRaney. In diesem wunderbaren und humorvollen
TED Talk spricht er über den
Survivorship Bias:
"Success stories are often used as templates while the most valuable lessons hide in the history of endeavors that did not end well."
Als ein Beispiel, warum man sich nicht ausschließlich an den super Erfolgreichen orientieren soll, nennt er die Gastronomie:
"If you see a cluster of super successes, that is evidence for a business you should avoid. Because they must be super successful to survive in a hostile enviroment. Most restaurants fail after about three years, statistically speaking. So when they fail, they are removed from your view [...] all that's left behind are the super successes. [...] The super successes misrepresent the restaurant business as a whole."
Fazit
"The great lesson from survivorship bias is that the advice business
is a monopoly run by survivors. That means that they can't tell what you
ought not to do, what you shouldn't do. [...] So if you base your all
of your knowledge on how to do things of the super successful or you
pour over books that detail the histories of companies that shook the
planet, your knowledge of the world would be extremely biased and
enormously incomplete because your are not learning about the failures
and you should really pay attention to the failures [...]"