Survivorship Bias
The Misconceptions:
✤ You should focus on the successful if you
wish to become successful.
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
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Survivorship Bias
The Truth:
✤ When failure becomes invisible, the
difference between failure and success may
also become invisible.
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
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Survivorship Bias
“Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet
gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. ...
You look to the successful for clues about the hidden,
about how to better live your life, about how you too
can survive similar forces against which you too
struggle.”
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
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“If you group successes together and look
for what makes them similar, the only real
answer will be LUCK.”
–Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow"
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Survivorship Bias
“It might seem disheartening, the fact that successful
people probably owe more to luck than anything
else, but only if you see luck as some sort of magic.
… The latest psychological research indicates that
luck is a long mislabeled phenomenon. … [Luck is]
the measurable output of a group of predictable
behaviors. Randomness, chance, and the noisy chaos
of reality may be mostly impossible to predict or
tame, but luck is something else.”
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
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Survivorship Bias
Luck is the combination of:
✤ A pattern of behaviors, that coincide with
✤ A style of understanding and interacting
✤ with events
✤ and people
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Survivorship Bias
Unlucky People:
✤ Narrowly focused
✤ Crave security
✤ More anxious
✤ Instead of willingly approaching unknown outcomes:
✤ Fixate on controlling situations
✤ Seek specific goals with no room for randomness.
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Fixed Mindset
A “Fixed Mindset” leads to a desire to look smart and a
tendency to...
✤ Avoid challenges
✤ Give up easily in the face of obstacles
✤ See effort as fruitless
✤ Ignore useful feedback or criticism
✤ Feel threatened by the successes of others
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Survivorship Bias
Lucky People (those who consider themselves Lucky):
✤ Constantly change routines
✤ Seek out new experiences
✤ Place themselves in situations where anything could
happen more often
✤ Expose themselves to more random chance
✤ Try more things, and fail more often...
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Growth Mindset
A “Growth Mindset” leads to a desire to learn and
therefore a tendency to...
✤ Embrace challenges
✤ Persist in the face of obstacles
✤ See effort as a path to mastery
✤ Learn from criticism
✤ Find lessons and inspiration in the successes of others
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I haven’t failed. I’ve just found
10,000 ways that don’t work.
–Thomas Edison
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“Unlucky people miss chance opportunities
because they are too focused on looking for
something else. They go to parties intent on
finding their perfect partner and so miss
opportunities to make good friends. They look
through newspapers determined to find certain
types of job advertisements and as a result miss
other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed
and open, and therefore see what is there rather
than just what they are looking for.”
– Richard Wiseman, in an article written for “Skeptical Inquirer”
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So, how do I do that?
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Seek out new experiences
✤ Community involvement
✤ Grow your skill set
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✤ The part of LUCK that includes
“interacting with the events
and people you encounter
throughout life,” including:
✤ Changing routines
✤ Placing yourself in situations
where anything could
happen
✤ Being exposed to more
random chance
✤ The part of LUCK that
demonstrates:
✤ Evidence of “experiences”
✤ You’ve learned, and can
continue learning.
Community Skills
Definitions:
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✤ Self
Community Skills
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In the
beginning, there
was a penguin...
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✤ Self
✤ User Groups & Meetups
✤ *NIX
✤ Server Management
Community Skills
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“It's not what you know,
but who you know that counts…”
–Tired, Overused Proverb
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✤ Self
✤ User Groups & Meetups
✤ IRC
Community Skills
✤ *NIX
✤ Server Management
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Try more things, fail more often...
Don't be afraid to walk away from a
job that is not a good fit.
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And then came
the Beastie...
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✤ Self
✤ User Groups & Meetups
✤ IRC
✤ Friends & Family
✤ *NIX
✤ Server Management
Community Skills
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Try more things, fail more often...
Find a niche that speaks to you.
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Constantly change routines...
"If you're not the worst musician in in
your band, you should immediately
switch bands."
–Common saying among jazz musicians
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✤ Self
✤ User Groups & Meetups
✤ IRC
✤ Friends & Family
✤ Recruiters
✤ *NIX
✤ Server Management
✤ Shell Scripting
✤ SEC
Community Skills
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Always be polite to recruiters.
Always.
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Try more things, fail more often...
Find a niche that speaks to you.
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Zabbix
The monitoring era begins...
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✤ Self
✤ User Groups & Meetups
✤ IRC
✤ Friends & Family
✤ Recruiters
✤ Forums & Email Lists
✤ Blogging
✤ *NIX
✤ Server Management
✤ Shell Scripting
✤ SEC
✤ Monitoring (Zabbix)
✤ Python
Community Skills
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GitHub
Social coding goes mainstream.
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How Lucky?
✤ Seek out new experiences
✤ Place themselves in
situations where
anything could happen
more often
✤ Expose themselves to
more random chance
✤ Try more things, and fail
more often...
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“Publish Or Perish”
–Academics Everywhere
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git push and flourish
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✤ Constantly change routines
✤ Seek out new experiences
✤ Place themselves in
situations where anything
could happen more often
✤ Expose themselves to more
random chance
✤ Try more things, and fail
more often...
✤ Narrowly focused
✤ Crave security
✤ More anxious
✤ Instead of willingly
approaching unknown
outcomes:
✤ Fixate on controlling
situations
✤ Seek specific goals with no
room for randomness.
“Lucky” “Unlucky”
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✤ Constantly change routines
✤ Seek out new experiences
✤ Place themselves in
situations where anything
could happen more often
✤ Expose themselves to more
random chance
✤ Try more things, and fail
more often...
✤ Narrowly focused
✤ Shows controlled
situations
✤ Cannot show how you
respond to randomness.
✤ Ineffective at
demonstrating your
“Luck”
“Lucky” Résumés
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Résumés Are
Dead
by Richie Norton
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Start Something
Stupid
✤ Create a program that solves a
problem at your work
✤ Create a community
✤ Start helping others succeed
with no anticipation of reward
✤ Write an app that does
something you want, even if it
seems silly.
✤ ???
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“A stupid decision that works out well
becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.”
–Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow"
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“A stupid decision that works out well
becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.”
–Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow"
Try more things, fail more often...
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Steve Jobs
As a college dropout, he and a few friends
started building computers in his parent's
garage. He was booted out of his own
company. He kept going, and dared “to
be one of the crazy ones.”
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Linus Torvalds
He was just a college student when he
started work on the Linux kernel.
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Shay Banon
Wanted to remake his single-node search
product into something more scalable.
The result was Elasticsearch.
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Jordan Sissel
Created tools to help him be a better
SysAdmin.
Logstash was one of these tools.
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Rashid Khan
Was dissatisfied with the "Logstash Web"
tool.
Created Kibana as a replacement.
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Logstash
A new toy becomes an obsession...
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The ELK Stack
...before there was even a company!
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✤ Self
✤ User Groups & Meetups
✤ IRC
✤ Friends & Family
✤ Recruiters
✤ Forums & Email Lists
✤ Blogging
✤ GitHub
✤ *NIX
✤ Server Management
✤ Shell Scripting
✤ SEC
✤ Monitoring (Zabbix)
✤ Python
Community Skills
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Curator
Managing your Elasticsearch indices
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What now?
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“Change” your mind
✤ Overcome Survivorship Bias
✤ Practice the skills of success to become “lucky”
✤ Develop a growth mindset
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✤ Constantly change routines
✤ Seek out new experiences
✤ Place themselves in
situations where anything
could happen more often
✤ Expose themselves to more
random chance
✤ Try more things, and fail
more often...
✤ Narrowly focused
✤ Crave security
✤ More anxious
✤ Instead of willingly
approaching unknown
outcomes:
✤ Fixate on controlling
situations
✤ Seek specific goals with no
room for randomness.
“Lucky” “Unlucky”
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Service: Helping others
✤ Serve one or more communities by helping others find
solutions to their problems:
✤ Online:
✤ IRC, Forums, Email Lists, Blogs, GitHub, etc.
✤ Offline:
✤ User Groups, Meetups, Conventions, etc.
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Participation: Ask Questions
✤ Ask for help
✤ Be careful of “RTFM” communities, but do not
follow suit.
✤ Share the knowledge you’ve gained by helping
someone else with the same question (Service!)
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Creation: Build something
✤ Build something...
✤ ...new!
✤ ...that supports another project!
✤ ...that makes your job (or your co-worker’s jobs)
easier.
✤ Then share it with others (GitHub, etc.)
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08 May 2015
Change yourself, change the world.
Take that first step...