For the past week or two, a magazine’s been lying open in my bathroom. It’s open to a page about midway through, where a businesswoman gives her rule for success: “Assume Failure Is Impossible”. It just struck me: really, this could well be just an example of survivor bias. Warren Buffett gave another example in his The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville speech, in which an “elite” group of coin-flippers mistakes random good fortune as an indicator of their great skill in calling coin tosses.
Assume failure is impossible. When creating your supersonic land vehicle, crashing and burning is impossible. When tapping out your HELOC to fund your online business selling Tahitian carved pepper shakers, assume failure is impossible. When…you get the idea. Maybe, assuming failure is impossible isn’t always the best approach?
“Assume failure is impossible” is one philosophy of decision-making. It’s a high-stakes one: either you’ll win big, or you’ll lose big. If you win big, you may be asked to offer “rules for success” to a national personal-finance magazine. If you lose big…well, I guess there aren’t a lot of lessons to learn from your business sense!
And thus, readers of this magazine learn a rule for success: assume failure is impossible.
