- We always tend to look at the winners and assume that they won because of something specific. It's near impossible to know how many people might have lost doing the same specific things. - We are often thought that it's important to set a good goal and that having clear goals is what is needed to succeed but even those who fail set goals - just that we don't hear about them. - A good example is thinking that most startup founders succeed in their first go like Larry Page, Bill Gates or Zuckerberg. Those are counter examples far from the reality but somehow we think of them as the examples to strive for. ---- Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed. Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. - James Clear in [[Atomic Habits]]