I am one of those people who is not into motivation speeches by rockstar CEOs. I especially mean those popular lectures that have been cut to short videos that pop on your Facebook or Twitter feed. Typical advices are all the same: never give up, trust yourself, keep on trying! Sounds familiar?
I admit that I am trying to follow that advice myself, but more and more selectively. Encouraging people to sacrifice time (money) and health to whatever "trying" against the odds is a disastrous guideline for most of the population! Eventually, there are not that many people with Midas touch. Giving up a hopeless venture and moving on is much better more often. The worth of trying depends on the expected benefits compared to alternative costs. If the odds are against you, even the whole lifetime of pointless trying can be equal to a desperate lottery ticket. Evaluating a pool of opportunities, choosing wisely and putting moderate effort on a good choice is better than a fixed full devotion to one poorly selected path.
Media loves to sell rags to riches stories where an average person decides to beat the odds. Identifiable characters and their dreams are easy to buy by common people. However, mathematically speaking, it is usually not crude labor and strong will that have exceptionally made these "average persons" successful stars. It is merely called luck. The world is full of similar energetic people in regular positions who do not end up in headlines. Fortune did not favor them.
Of course many times success is about special skills. For those people the odds are also better by default. Entrepreneurial theories provide fancy concepts of "alertness" and ability to "imagine" opportunities. For example, two people may analyze and react very differently to similar new information. If exceptional and objectively identifiable abilities are controlled, only luck is left to explain the difference. The more you try, the more you take chances (against the odds), the more likely you are to succeed. It is the same with lottery. Interesting thing here is that there are no fixed odds in real life. Only indicative fragmented information exist for eventual individual judgment.
If you only listen to the ones who had success, you miss data about the ones who 1) tried and failed, and 2) never tried against the odds. They represent the complementary part of the truth that usually becomes untold. Consequently, listening to the most popular success lectures does not make you account for a) the possible real success factors (other than luck), and b) the alternative cost for your own health, time and money. Different people may believe in different things and thus stand uncertainty in what they do. However, decisions can be either ignorant or accounted for surrounding realities.
In business research, so called contingency theory studies the impact of contextual factors on performance by utilizing statistics. For a single successful person, it is really difficult to both identify and assess the impact of tangible success factors oneself. Many times success factors are of intangible, tacit nature and hard to transfer. That has not prevented exceptional individuals from post-rationalizing their actions and writing a new story of their history to be sold on Amazon.
For a balanced view of success, you should merely ask: Why did some people try something in the first place, whereas others did not even bother? What made people quit trying at some point? Were there similarities or crucial differences between the ones who succeeded and those who did not?
Survivorship and other selection biases happen to us in our everyday lives. When we find a set of information, we should go to assumptions and ask ourselves, if there exists an invisible counterpart for a specific reason. Mastering this is a great advance in reasoning.
If you are interested to read more about survivorship bias, consider reading this.