BEING LESS STUPID #10 - Survivorship Bias

Any plan will fail, My PARA setup in Roam Research, Temptation Bundling, 4 Laws of Behavior Change

Sep 25, 2020

👋 Hello,

Like many of you, I sit down every morning and plan my day before I start my work. I prioritize my work, block my time, and schedule my tasks for the day. Rarely my days go as planed. Kids calling for help with their school work. An unexpected call from a friend I can not avoid. Email from one of my clients. The list goes on and on. Most plans fall apart when it meets reality. Having other options to steer the ship when things don’t go as planned is smart planning. Knowing that our plan will fail and leaving room for error is being less stupid.

🔻 BEING LESS STUPID

My uncle used to tell me that music nowadays is nonsense compared to the music of the 1970s when he was a teenager. That, my friends, is Survivorship Bias. What he doesn’t recognize is that there are tens of thousands of songs from the 1970s that are forgotten because they were bad.

"Survivorship Bias is concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility"

Here is a great list of real-world examples of Survivorship Bias by Sreenivasan

✍ Writing

1. PARA for organizing my second brain

PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. It is an organization system for managing digital information and personal knowledge. We can organize any digital information into one of these four buckets. Read more

2. My PARA setup in Roam Reserach

I recorded my PARA setup in Roam Research. I also incorporated tasks part of my project and eliminated the need for a separate task manager. My setup is called PARTI - Projects, Areas, Resources, Tasks, Inbox