Do you know what you don't know?

There are many philosophies that state that the quality of life depends on what you focus on. Consequently, you end up in an environment which represents what you pay most attention to. Even if it is not your intention.

During the Second World War a research has been done to track bullet holes on Allied planes that encountered Nazi anti-aircraft fire, in order to strengthen the fleet.

At first, the military wanted to reinforce those areas that were mostly hit, because clearly that was where the ground crew observed the most consistent damage on returning planes.

It was the prime focus of the research team, until some Hungarian-born mathematician pointed out something that nobody considered before. Only the planes that made it safely home were part of the investigation. Planes that did not, were not part of the study.

In that moment, it transpired that the parts of the planes that needed better protection were the ones that did not have damage.

It sounds counter-intuitive, however, those areas where the ones that planes would not survive a hit and hence those planes never made it home.

What can we learn from this?

Unless we make a conscious effort to include information that is not immediately available to us, we will always find a reason to think we are right.

The moment the input changes, everything else also changes.

This is called a survivorship bias, a logical error were you focus on things that survived when you should really be looking at things that didn’t.

There is a great amount of learning from a success story but even greater one from failure.