Are successful people actually readers?

How you tend to look only survivors

I recently came across this article on Medium

And to be honest, this title is absolutely shit, the best example of misleading clickbait.

I can bet not every successful people reads books, Ashneer Grover is one of them, Gary Vee is another and there are many more people who themselves have claimed in interviews that they don’t read books but are successful.

On media or social media platforms we have heard phrases like “Readers are Leaders” and “An Avg CEO reads 52 books every year” and “Reading makes people successful”

And this is insane stupidity, it is called survivorship bias, a bias where we only notice people who have survived, people who were successful and neglect all those who did the same thing but failed or didn’t survive.

Survivorship bias is the tendency of our mind to study successful outcomes or successful people and ignore the failures.

There would be millions of people who read books and yet aren’t successful, people who read books and yet aren’t leaders, and those who are CEOs but don’t read books.

Well, why then do people believe in so-called bullshit?

Because the media celebrates only successful people, they show their characteristic traits and tend to attribute their success to one of the traits.

The media won’t interview people who have failed because it is not glorifying and not something which grabs attention.

You aspire to be a successful someone who comes in an interview, not some failed loser, and hence you fall victim to only viewing survivors and making an opinion.

You will wrongly attribute the success of those people to the same thing, the same habit a lot of people had but that didn’t result in any kind of success.

Always remember: Not every successful person is a reader. Not every reader is a successful person.

Reading books can play a part in the success of something but it is not the only thing which results in someone’s success.

And whenever you come to a quick conclusion about something, ask yourself “What am I missing here?”

“What am I missing here?” will help you in cases where there are chances of falling for survivorship bias.

Thank you for patiently reading.

I hope this helped.