How the Common Traits of Successful People Get Made

Introduction: A List That Looks Like Evidence

Habits common to successful people. Patterns of thought only billionaires hold. Such lists line the bookshops and scroll past without pause. Observe many cases, extract a law — it has the look of induction, that venerable form of reasoning.

Which traits to adopt, and in what order, are already well documented. What this article takes up is one step before. By what procedure was that list of “common traits” produced in the first place?

Here is the conclusion first. A procedure that gathers only those who succeeded and then looks for shared features contains its conclusion in advance. What has not been counted is the people who held the same features and did not succeed.

The Piece of Craft Planted at the Starting Point

The way a list gets made looks, at a glance, thoroughly scientific. Gather successful founders, investors and asset holders by the dozen or the hundred. Examine their habits, phrases, convictions and daily order in detail. Extract the features many of them share. They rise early. They read. They are unafraid of failure. Lined up, these become “how successful people think.”

But one decisive piece of craft is planted at the starting point. The object of observation has been restricted, from the beginning, to people who succeeded.

The investigator enters the rooms of the successful and looks for shared features. They never set foot in the rooms of those who did not succeed. People who rose early, read widely, feared no failure and did not become wealthy sit outside the frame of observation from the start. What is being gathered is only “people who succeeded and hold the feature.” Not one person who held the feature and did not succeed has been counted.

Miss this and the list takes on a magical persuasiveness. It is a fact that most of the successful people examined rose early. But among those who did not succeed there are early risers by the thousand. If the rate of success does not differ between early risers and late ones, the observation that early rising is a common trait of the successful says nothing at all.

There is a further device. Line up several hundred successful people and some shared feature will always be found. If not early rising, then being a night owl; if not reading, then a preference for the field. From a group already sifted by outcome, patterns fitting any story at all can be extracted afterwards, without limit. What was bound to be found has merely been found.

Nobody Counts the Aircraft That Did Not Return

The story that teaches this error most vividly comes from the Second World War.

American forces were examining returning bombers. Bullet holes clustered on the wings and fuselage; around the engines there was almost no damage. Read plainly, the conclusion is to reinforce the wings and fuselage, where the damage is heaviest.

Here the statistician Abraham Wald offered the opposite reading [Wald, 1943]. The armour should go where the holes are fewest — around the engines. What was being examined was only aircraft that had managed to return. Aircraft hit in the engine never made it back to base and never reached the survey table. The engines of surviving aircraft show little damage not because engines are safe, but because every aircraft hit there went down.

The insight came to be called survivorship bias. Build a law from what survived, and because what did not survive has vanished from the sample, cause and effect can invert wholesale.

What is frightening about the story is that the returning aircraft are not lying. The bullet holes are all genuine, the data accurate, the observation sound. And still, taking only the visible data at face value inverts the conclusion. The problem lay not in the correctness of the data but in the size of what had dropped out of it.

▸ Errors other than sample bias — reverse causation and confounding — are taken up in their way of thinking may be the result, not the cause.

Why the Successful Person’s Own Account Is the Least Reliable

This is where accounts of success become decisive.

Successful people are not lying. Most sincerely believe that their habits and convictions brought the result. But that sincere conviction knows nothing of the aircraft that went down. The survivor is precisely the one least able to notice those who did not survive. Which is why a successful person’s account of the secret is at once the most earnest and the least reliable testimony available.

And what reaches us is only the story of those who became wealthy — the aircraft that came back to base. People who held the same habits, practised the same thinking and did not become wealthy appear in no bestseller and no thread of success. So the observation that successful people share this way of thinking can never be falsified. Nobody puts on the survey table the countless people who held it and went down.

There is a counterintuitive fact here. That cases accumulate and that causation is supported are entirely different things. Enlarge a sample without counting a single downed aircraft and a skewed conclusion merely looks, skewed as it is, ever more certain. A belief with no occasion for falsification keeps looking correct indefinitely. But looking correct and being correct are separate things.

Not Reading an Observed Trait Straight as a Cause

Even setting the sample bias aside, another error remains: the habit of treating an observed shared feature as a cause, immediately.

Social psychology knows a well-documented tendency called the fundamental attribution error [Ross, 1977; Jones & Harris, 1967]. Explaining another person’s behaviour or achievement, we underweight the force of the situation they stand in and overweight internal qualities. Seeing someone fall in the street we think “a careless person” and overlook the ice underfoot. The force of the situation sinks into the background, and only character and disposition push to the front.

The error works especially hard in the presence of success. Seeing someone build wealth, we ask reflexively what they were thinking. The answer then gets sought on the side of thinking and disposition. Economic growth in the era they were born into, a wave they happened to catch, inherited capital, a fortunate turn at a decisive moment — all such situational force is quietly taken off the stage of explanation.

Why do we seek causes in the interior? Because an interior story is far easier to grasp and to remember. “He obtained wealth through a structurally advantageous position and the coincidence of several accidents” is complex, unglamorous, unmemorable. “He obtained wealth through strong conviction and correct thinking” is simple, dramatic, and can be made into a lesson.

The problem is that this ease of telling has nothing whatever to do with correctness.

Conclusion: Changing How the List Is Read, by One Notch

“The common traits of successful people” are not a law discovered by observing the world as it is. They are a pattern found afterwards, inside a sample first sifted by the outcome called success. Count the countless people who fell outside the sieve, and the pattern may vanish without trace.

Let me be clear here. This is not a call to doubt successful individuals, still less to jeer at them. What is being looked at is the manufacture of the sample — a mechanism that operates quite independently of any speaker’s sincerity.

Simply knowing this changes how the next list is read. “Where were the people who held this feature and did not do well counted?” Insert that question once and the list shifts position, from a model to be traced into a hypothesis to be examined.

The whole picture is gathered in why copying a millionaire mindset does not make you rich.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Wald, A. A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors (1943) Statistical Research Group, Columbia University
• Ross, L. “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10 (1977)
• Jones, E. E., & Harris, V. A. “The Attribution of Attitudes” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 3(1) (1967)