Why Overestimating Your Chances of Success Is Dangerous? Here’s What You Can Do

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It seems as if you will likely succeed if you do what others do to succeed.

Then, you start imitating somebody who is successful, and the feeling to this success might become so great when you are broke. You want to get rid of this awful situation. You can’t do anything as you don’t have an internal compass to guide you towards a specific goal.

The reality is that success does not come easily.

What seems to be the problems?

At this point, you are stuck. Perhaps, you just follow what is out there. Rolf Dobelli, the author of a book titled: “The art of thinking clearly,” writes many people fail to recognize the survivorship bias, which means they overestimate their chances of success. You do not know the story of the unsuccessful so that you fail to learn something from them. No one wants to dig up soul-destroying stories.

The failure happens because of the lack of strategy.

Are there any alternative ways to solve this problem?

Cal Newport, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, suggests that there are three phases you need to go through: sharpening skills, building assets, and establishing networks. You must put efforts and hard work into refining them.

Skill is fundamental to the success. As craftmen, skill is their start-ups. What kind of skills do you need? Those that people are willing to pay. This phase is very crucial; therefore, you get more work to do. Once you sharpen your skill, you hone your craft. The next step is to package the skills to be the asset as your value.

When you make the value get noticed, you create opportunities to sell it. Cash comes with transaction: you sell something ( your value). Then, you need to scale up your business.

The network is the tool to reach more prospects. Your network will be effective when others think that you can contribute to their circles, otherwise, you’ll be parasites to them.

Be careful to survivorship bias and prepare yourself to craft your own path of success: skill, asset, and network.