# Forty Faces on a Hoarding

> Survivorship bias, and why studying only the winners teaches the wrong lessons.

Mental models · 2026-10-20 · by Manas Jain · https://samanar.in/a/survivorship-bias

Every flyover in the city has the same hoarding. Forty smiling faces, each with an IIT rank under it. "Our toppers." Your cousin's parents see it on the way home and sign him up that evening.

Nobody asks the obvious question. How many students sat in that institute's classrooms the same year?

The hoarding has room for forty faces. Not for the thousands who didn't make it.

## What's going on

This is **survivorship bias**: we judge by the things that made it through, and forget the ones that didn't. The failures have left the room.

Open Instagram and you'll see it with money. Screenshots of trading apps, ₹50,000 turned into ₹5 lakh, "quit your job, I did."

In 2024, SEBI, India's market regulator, looked at every individual who had traded futures and options over the previous three years. **93% lost money.** That's more than a crore people, losing about ₹2 lakh each on average.

The winners post screenshots. The losers quietly delete the app.

## Where you'll spot it

- **Dropout founders.** "He left college and built a billion-dollar company." Thousands of others left too. **Nobody interviews them.**
- **"They don't make them like they used to."** Old buildings and old songs seem better because the weak ones are long gone.
- **Mutual fund returns.** Funds that did badly often get merged or shut, so the survivors make the past look better.
- **Customer feedback.** A survey of your customers only hears from people who stayed. The ones who left, and why, are missing.

## The catch

Not every winner just got lucky. Sometimes the survivors really did something different. You can only tell **by looking at the failures too**. If they did the same thing, it wasn't the secret.

## How to use it

Before copying a success story, ask three things:

1. *Who isn't in this picture?*
2. Of everyone who tried this, **how many made it?**
3. Did the ones who failed do the same thing?

Next time you pass that hoarding, ask the institute for the other number: how many joined. If you run a business, talk to the customers who left. Your happiest ones can't tell you why people go.

> Every success story has a silent crowd behind it. Count them before you copy.