Special forces training is taken by a large number of people - some of these people are just chancing it, hoping they will be able to push through anyway but not really prepared or ready for it. Others, like your brother, are fully prepared. When looking at a base rate, it's important to understand the different divisions inside that base rate and the reasons people drop out.<p>In special training, the reasons people are likely to drop out are because they aren't physically fit enough to cope. This gives your a brother a good indication - he likely knows others of similar fitness to him who passed. The key here is that there isn't much randomness involved - either you are fit enough or you aren't.<p>Startups are a completely different ballgame. The main factors behind dropping out are a complete mystery - team composition, relationships, lucky deals with investors, hitting your marketing in at the same time some other big player pulls out or pitches in - the list is endless and impossible to even fully understand.<p>Basically what I'm trying to get at is that comparing something you have complete control over (special forces training) vs something you don't (a startup's success) is not a great analogy.<p>However you're still correct anyway - the best indicator of whether a startup succeeds is whether or not they try in the first place! So it's always best to try and ignore the baseline.
Aww. I bet the person who won the lottery thought they were special, too.<p>Clearly, there is a grand misunderstanding of statistics here.<p>In order to make yourself an exception to the statistics, you're going to have to scientifically explain how you are going to become better. Everyone <i>believes</i> they're better. How are you, truly, going to go above and beyond? Do you have better connections than the average? Do you have the experience needed? Do you have a better idea which is downright guaranteed to succeed?<p>If you can answer Yes to all of those questions, congratulations, you are the average Startup Individual, and the statistics do apply to you. You're going to have to work really hard, have all the right things fall into place, and do everything right, and even then you still have an extremely large chance of failure. It is the nature of the situation.<p>Starting a startup isn't like playing the lottery. You have maybe 20% more control over your outcome. But 80% is still in the hand you're dealt, both as a person and as a company. Make the best of it.
Contrary to most commenters here, I've recently started to embrace "being a statistic." I think completely understanding where you stand (on the normal curve) is not only important when helping you prepare for taking an exam, approaching a girl, or launching a startup, but also important for the many (many) inevitable failures. You will be able to deduce what you did right, what you did wrong, how to improve, etc. given where you started.<p>I think that embracing your inner statistic is a good, if not great, idea. Don't be depressed because you're not that special snowflake, instead try to understand where you are, where you want to be, and what, exactly, you have to do to get there. If there's a 99% chance that you won't get from where you are to where you want to be doing whatever it is you're doing, either amend your goals or do it a different way.<p>Sometimes there's no shame in folding.
His brother is correct: statistics are a group property, or rather, they are they description of what happened with a particular group.<p>When when you start making predictions you're talking probability not statistics. Statistics may inform probability but there can be issues with this (eg bad sample, insufficiently sized sample, failure to identify the underlying characteristic(s) such that samples are actually flawed and so on).<p>The problem we have with a species is that we conflate the two. This comes up with highly political issues such as racial profiling. Imagine a situation in a southern border state where statistically more illegal aliens are Hispanic in both absolute and relative terms (meaning absolute number and relative percentage of their given populations). I say this not as a fact but as a non-judgemental scenario to make a point: law enforcement will likely, consciously or subsconsciously, make different suspicions based on such external characteristics.<p>Is this fair to the individual? Of course not. It borders on an assumption of guilt. People of Middle Eastern descent who regularly fly I'm sure are cursed with this kind of suspicion when almost all of them have done absolutely nothing wrong.<p>Anyway, as to special training, a relative of mine was married to a guy who went through SAS training (and passed). To those who think this is simply an issue of being sufficiently physically fit, you couldn't be more wrong. Now you have to be sufficiently fit for it to be possible to pass but after that it's a mental issue.<p>They put these guys through mentally strenuous situations: sleep deprivation followed by interrogation, psychological profiling and the like.<p>His brother has another point though: on an individual level you should never assume you're going to fail (or succeed for that matter) based on group statistics. Engineering is currently male-dominated but no woman should ever take that as evidence that they can't do it as an individual. Nor should any man assume a specific woman is less likely to be capable, etc.
><i>He explained that statistics are created for groups, not for individuals. As an individual, it's not relevant to you. He went on to pass the course on a broken ankle. That makes me think about some startup founders. Their companies should have died, since most die. They should have given up, since most give up. But, somehow they willed their company to exist. Startup failure is a group statistic, it doesn't apply to you.</i><p>Yes. Also known as "survivorship bias".<p>Fact is, the brothers of all the other people who attended that course could have (and might had) said the exact same things to their brother. And most of them would be proven wrong.<p>Group statistics are indeed about groups. It's our way to predict what the most likely outcome is for individual members of a group taken at random (or all other things being equal).
This is one of the Five Hazardous Attitudes that make you an accident-prone person, a risk factor identified by the FAA<p><a href="http://www.avhf.com/html/Evaluation/HazardAttitude/Hazard_Attitude_Intro.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.avhf.com/html/Evaluation/HazardAttitude/Hazard_At...</a><p>Reduce your risk and improve your expectation values by rationally using decision theory and correcting the systematic sampling biases in your head.
If you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything.<p>Except compute an uncomputable function. Or transmit information faster than the speed of light. Or simultaneously measure the speed and momentum of a particle with errors whose product is less than half the planck constant.<p>But apart from that, anything.
Reminds me of Steven Jay Gould's classic "The Median Isn't the Message":<p>"If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation.<p>But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation."<p><a href="http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html</a>
You still need a backup plan, I assume that if you fail special forces selection you get to keep your job in the regular military.<p>If your startup goes bad, make sure it doesn't leave you in an untenable financial situation regardless of how optimistic you are.
Although I like the sentiment, I disagree with the accuracy of this.<p>Attrition is a group statistic. It doesn't apply to you if and only if you are exceptional in some way. Otherwise, it applies to you even more.<p>In the specific example, his brother knew he was so much harder than his peers that he could do something incredible, like run for miles with a broken ankle. That mental toughness is how he was exceptional, and why he could be confident that he would be one of the people that made it.
Ignoring base rates is a great idea until you are hit by a base rate. And by definition, you are probably going to be hit by a base rate. Everyone who succeed <i>and</i> failed all thought they were an special individual.
Most people don't win the lottery. Statistically speaking, you almost always lose. So why play, right?<p>Sometimes, its okay to ignore the statistics and hope for the best. Sometimes, its okay to stop hoping and start believing, even if the odds are grim.<p>Selection bias does teach us one useful thing. That you don't win if you give up.
I feel like not being realistic about your odds is a very dangerous game to play. Sure, you can <i>maybe</i> grit your teeth and bear it. But you also might totally burn out doing something unrealistic.<p>This applies to more than just start ups: It's very rare that you can succeed through sheer stubbornness, many times you'll just end up hurting yourself.
Startup success and lottery wins are very different things. You don't get better at lottery as you buy more tickets over the years; but you get better at your trade as you do it more and more, even if you fail at each previous attempt to start a company.<p>If you see it as a lottery, then it doesn't make sense for people to try starting their own companies after several failed trials when they reach some middle age, as they really don't have much time left. But, it is just the opposite, because they are actually much better at seeing pitfalls and bs, and are a lot more likely to be successful.<p>So, the statistics do matter, you just need to know the kind of statistics that apply. As a rule of thumb, in real life, it is usually not the lottery kind.
Classic survivorship bias scenario. Nevermind that all the other people in the course went in with equally inspiring slogans like Failure Is Not An Option tatooed across their buttocks. Some people fail, sometimes it's going to be you.
We're doing motivational posters here now? Okay, we can do that.<p>I recommend: the Tao of Programming <a href="http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html</a>
60% of people drop out[0] - before you knew this, you had an 60% chance of dropping out. Now you know the statistics, you can go about exerting effort to end up in the 40% that don't drop out. And that number - 60% to 40% - tells you a little bit about how much effort you're going to need to put in (not much).<p>90% of startups fail[1] - now you know that, you want to put yourself in the 10% that don't. 90% to 10% is a bigger gap to jump than 60 to 40, so it's going to be a lot harder.<p>0,1: not actual statistics
This is The Biggest Lie Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves (tm).<p>You hear about the fact that only 10% of startups succeed, but you tell yourself "I'm better than them". pg himself reinforces this notion by saying things like "some founders have a 0% chance of success, others a 95% chance".<p>pg is right, in a sense, but there is very little way for you to know whether you really are "better" than others. Very few people actually know what makes a startup successful, so there's that. On top of which, the people who are taken into account in the 10% statistic includes, among others, people who are building their 5th startup, the sons of highly influential politicians, personal friends of movie actors, etc. It includes people 30 years in a particular industry, with tons of insider knowledge, who decided to build a product in that industry. And it includes other 21 year olds with stars in their eyes, and nothing more.<p>This isn't to say "don't build a startup". That's a different conversation, and depends a lot on your goals in life.<p>But most people are in the startup game at least partially for the money. And for the purposes of calculating your potential earnings, unless you have a <i>good</i> reason why you're special, <i>pay attention to the damn statistics</i>!
My oncologist told me "Statistics are not people."<p>I was about to undergo a bone marrow transplant. At the time, mortality within the first year was 90%. But I was much healthier initially than most other patients, because I had different medical history.<p>Plus, I'm one tough SOB.
What if he broke more than his ankle?<p>Obviously he was mentally and physically prepared for the course. But a course is predictable. Startup economics are more like combat, you can be the best soldier but an IED finds you.
"Who cares what statistics show? Look at medicine. 80% of people with pancreatic cancer die within 5 years and 95% of appendectimies occur with zero complications. But we both know cases of pancreatic cancer patients that lived and appendicitis patients that unfortunately passed. Statistics mean nothing to the individual"
- Dr. Cox (Scrubs)<p>That quote has always stuck with me since I saw that episode, if you enter a situation knowing statistics of outcomes, it can affect how you perform.
Meh, I agree with him... if only because I'm one of those guys who cares about how I perform. It's like being in the gym... I'm not going to be the strongest guy in the room, but what I do care about is how progress.<p>At the end of the day, I don't care how others do it outside of learning from how others didn't succeed and those who did.
"...we've found a very serious problem: no matter how carefully we select the mean, no matter how patiently we make the analysis, when they get here something happens: it always turns out that approximately half of them are below average!"
-Richard Feynman
This is a very acute observation. It applies to you, but not in a way you think. In fact, as an individual it probably means the opposite to you.<p>Check out Douglas Hofstadter's GEB, for a really enlightening take on the topic. Check index for "Aunt Hillary"
This is more or less the same point that Stephen Jay Gould made in "The Median Isn't the Message:"<p><a href="http://people.umass.edu/biep540w/pdf/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://people.umass.edu/biep540w/pdf/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.p...</a>
This is why there are so many graduate students who can't find jobs. The prospects (acceptable for STEM, dismal for all else) are published, but people who are used to being the "1 in 10" fail to realize that, when it counts, they likely will be. The other 9, it turns out, are Ivy-educated smart people just like them.<p>This might apply to VC-istan as well, although I think founders are less delusional about it than employees. Founders become EIR if the thing flops; employees think the business is "fully de-risked" (because they're told that to justify the 0.0x-percent equity slices) and that they're <i>guaranteed</i> to actually get the executive positions they were promised (ha!).