By Richard Tardif
Survivorship bias, or “If I did it you can too” advice is a huge problem in the fitness, health and wellness industry. Fitness advice is given by the tiny amount who have personal success advice, but not towards reducing the failure rate, and it is immortalized by the marketing of shiny diets, eat this not that, and higher volumes of exercise, go further and go faster, and if it works for me, it will for you.
In its simplest definition, survivorship bias is a well-known psychological tendency to focus on the people who have passed some kind of physical or emotional selection process or perfect storm to be considered winners and our heroes, forgetting about other important factors, because we want something so much it causes us to focus on what winners and heroes do right, instead of learning what people do wrong.
We model and accept advice around what is working best for a handful of outliers, those few successful Davids who slayed Goliaths, and we do it with little regard to safety, recoverability or sustainability, Calories in, Calories out the prime example. In their minds, willpower is the limiting factor, and not their methods, yet they never question if a different path would have yielded the same or similar results.
So, if you want a body like mine, don’t do what I do, would be the better advice. Develop your own training plans, and methodologies to rise above others, but don’t tell me it will absolutely work for others.
Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success, writes,
“We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur.”
Gladwell notes this is the wrong lesson. The world in 1968 would only allow one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal. Something unique as Bill Gates success that Gladwell and others point out cannot be replicated on a large scale.
It is the same in the fitness, health and wellness industry. There is always an untold uniqueness, something left out of advice giving, that isn’t easy to replicate. So, do your own thing? And Just. Eat. Right.
Richard Tardif is an award-winning Journalist, author and personal fitness trainer. Richard’s first book Stop the Denial: A Case for Embracing the Truth About Fitness, challenges, surprises, and inspires you to embrace a fitness lifestyle that will work in achieving your individual goals.
