You have done it. So have I…
You see a result that looks like the one you want. Someone who got there.
A number, a timeline, a transformation. And before you have asked a single question about how it actually happened, part of you has already decided: if they did it, I can too.
This isn’t naivety. It’s two well-documented mechanisms working on you simultaneously.
Once you understand both, you will never read a case study, a testimonial, or a “here’s what worked for me” post the same way again.
Reason One: The Law of Truly Large Numbers
The Law of Truly Large Numbers states that with a large enough sample, any unlikely event will eventually happen!
Not because something special caused it.
Not because a particular method produced it.
Simply because when enough people try enough things, an outlier is mathematically guaranteed to appear somewhere.
Flip a coin enough times and someone will get ten heads in a row. That’s not skill. That’s volume.
In marketing and business, this plays out constantly…
Imagine a thousand founders all try the same tactic. Most will get average results. A small number will get poor results.
And one or two, through a specific combination of timing, audience warmth, market conditions, and variables they don’t fully control, will get a standout result.
That standout result was always going to happen to someone. It was statistically inevitable. 🙂
The problem isn’t that the result exists. The problem is what happens next.
That result gets isolated from the other 998 attempts, presented as proof of a method, and offered to the next wave of founders as evidence that it works.
The denominator disappears. The outlier becomes the headline.
And it’s worth noting: having more than one result to show doesn’t automatically solve this.
Ten wins look very different depending on whether it came from fifty attempts or five thousand. The question is always the same…
What’s the real number behind what’s being showcased?
Reason Two: Survivorship Bias
Survivorship bias is the tendency to focus only on the people or things that made it through a selection process, while overlooking those that didn’t, simply because the ones that didn’t are no longer visible.
You see the results of everyone who succeeded.
You almost never see the results of everyone who tried and failed, because failure doesn’t announce itself the way success does.
If the Law of Truly Large Numbers explains why a winner always exists, survivorship bias explains why that winner is the only story you ever hear!
The failures don’t post testimonials.
The 90% who bought the programme and didn’t get the promised result aren’t running workshops about it.
The founders who copied a tactic and stayed stuck aren’t writing threads about their experience.
The businesses that expanded into a new market and quietly lost ground in both aren’t appearing in your feed.
It’s not that these stories are being hidden on purpose. They are structurally invisible.
Success creates content. Failure goes quiet.
So the environment you are making decisions in isn’t a balanced picture of outcomes.
It’s a curated highlight reel of the results that were good enough to talk about, filtered through the natural human tendency to share wins and absorb losses privately.
Survivorship bias doesn’t require anyone to lie.
It operates automatically, simply because the people who achieve results are the ones with something to say about it.
When the Result Is Real but the Reason Isn't
There’s a third layer that makes this even harder to see through.
Sometimes the result is genuine, but the mechanism that produced it isn’t the one being sold.
Claim: An Instagram influencer posts, “I got 2 million views and 53 leads from one reel. Want to do the same?”
What isn’t mentioned: someone teaching Instagram growth will naturally get amplified by Instagram’s own algorithm. The platform rewards content about the platform. The result is real. The transferability to someone teaching something else entirely is not.
Claim: A growth hacker says they grew their LinkedIn organically, and invites you to a workshop to learn how.
What isn’t mentioned: they were running Facebook ads for that workshop, and the first thing on the workshop agenda was asking every attendee to follow them on LinkedIn. The followers weren’t organic. They were paid for, just indirectly!
Claim: A personal brand consultant, who built a substantial following on OnlyFans before pivoting, says she’ll teach you how to build a personal brand.
What isn’t mentioned: The initial audience, the trust, the visibility that made the pivot possible, came from a platform built on an entirely different kind of audience relationship, one that has nothing to do with thought leadership, content strategy, or the positioning principles she now teaches. The personal brand expertise didn’t build the audience. The audience existed before the expertise was ever positioned, and it was built through dynamics that simply cannot be replicated by following her personal branding advice.
None of these people may be deliberately deceiving anyone.
But the result they are offering to teach you to replicate wasn’t produced by what they’re claiming produced it.
The initial conditions are invisible. And the initial conditions are everything.
Three Times I've Seen This Play Out
The Coaching Programme
I invested in a coaching programme once because a friend had invested in it. Not because I had seen data on outcomes across the full cohort.
Because someone I trusted had acted on it, and that felt like enough.
It wasn’t. The programme turned out to be a waste of time and money.
The question I never asked was the only one that mattered: out of everyone who invested in this programme, how many actually got the result being showcased?
In most online coaching programmes, the honest answer sits around 10%. The other 90% don’t get the promised outcome.
Not because they are lazy or unqualified, but because results in any cohort follow a distribution.
The 10% who succeed become the testimonials. The 90% who don’t become the silent majority no one mentions.
The coach genuinely believes the programme works because their attention naturally gravitates toward the winners.
They showcase them, learn from them, and build the next pitch around them.
The base rate stays invisible, not always out of dishonesty, but because success is more memorable than the quiet majority who tried, paid, and moved on.
There’s also something specific to group coaching worth naming. Most students in a group programme are running similar types of businesses, which is usually why they joined the same programme.
But the tactics being taught are generic, built to apply to the whole cohort rather than customised to each business’s specific positioning, audience, or stage.
The student who gets the standout result often isn’t succeeding because the tactics were universally correct.
They are succeeding because those specific tactics happened to fit their specific situation closely enough.
Everyone else is applying the same uncustomised tactics to businesses that differ in the details that actually matter.
The $497 Funnel
An interior designer came to me with a funnel that wasn’t converting.
He had paid $497 for it, a template built and sold by a marketing guru, marketed as the system behind a million-dollar business.
The pull was obvious: one specific, impressive result. A million dollars. A price of $497. The implied logic: why wouldn’t I?
What he didn’t ask: how many people bought that template? Of those, how many ran a design practice rather than a coaching business? Of those, how many actually got results that justified the investment?
The template worked exactly as designed, for the business it was designed for.
But the Law of Truly Large Numbers had done its job: somewhere, across thousands of people who bought that template, someone had gotten a standout result. That result became the proof. The thousands who didn’t were never part of the pitch.
The Urge to Expand
An education consultant I worked with specialised in BS/MD admissions, a precise niche in which she had built genuine authority in.
She decided to expand into general college consulting because she could see others doing it successfully.
The implicit logic: they expanded, it worked for them, why can’t I do the same?
What she didn’t ask: of all the specialists who had attempted this same move, how many succeeded and how many quietly lost ground in both markets? The ones who expanded successfully were visible. They showed up in her feed, in industry conversations. The ones who diluted their positioning and struggled weren’t posting about it.
The expansion produced exactly what the invisible majority’s experience would have predicted: diluted positioning, rising costs, a confused audience, and a business that started performing worse in the niche it had originally owned.
The Questions to Ask Before You Act
This isn’t about distrust. It’s about having the right questions ready before the pull becomes a decision.
1. What’s the real number behind this result?
Not the headline outcome. How many people or businesses attempted the same thing, and what percentage got here? If that number isn’t available or isn’t being shared, that’s information in itself.
2. What were the initial conditions?
Every result comes with context that rarely gets mentioned. Existing audience, timing, brand authority, team, capital, platform dynamics. The result is visible. The initial conditions that made it possible usually aren’t.
3. What are the people who didn’t get this result doing right now?
They exist. They are just not in the showcase. Can you find them? What does their experience tell you?
4. Am I making this decision from clarity or from the discomfort of staying where I am? The pull toward a decision and the quality of that decision are not the same thing. Urgency, envy, and impatience all feel like reasons to act. They aren’t.
5. What does my current situation actually lose if this doesn’t work?
Not the upside. The downside. A contained risk and an existential one require very different levels of evidence before acting.
A Lens, Not a Verdict
None of this is about suspicion. Most people showcasing results aren’t being deliberately dishonest.
They are sharing what they genuinely believe is proof, filtered through the natural human tendency to remember and repeat what worked.
The problem is structural. The Law of Truly Large Numbers guarantees a winner will always exist.
Survivorship bias ensures that the winner is the only voice loud enough to be heard. Hidden initial conditions make the result look more transferable than it actually is.
I am not saying don’t learn from others. I am not saying results can’t be real or instructive.
What I am saying is that one result, or even several, without the denominator they came from and the conditions that produced them, isn’t enough to act on.
That standard applies to anyone making claims based on results. Including me.
What changes when you apply this lens isn’t that you stop being inspired by what others have achieved. It’s that you start asking the question that separates judgment from reaction: what actually produced this, and does any of that apply to where I am right now?
That question, asked consistently, is what keeps you building something real, rather than chasing something someone else was statistically guaranteed to find first.
If This Resonated, These Are Worth Reading Next
Tactic Culture: Why Your Marketing Never Compounds: The environment that keeps producing convincing-looking outlier results to borrow from.
Entropy in Marketing: Why Growth Breaks Without a Single Bad Decision: How small, individually reasonable decisions, like acting on someone else’s result, compound into drift over time.
First Principles Marketing: Why Borrowed Strategies Stop Working: How to examine whether a method is actually built on foundations that match your business.
Second-Order Consequences: How Small Marketing Decisions Create Long-Term Drift: What happens downstream when decisions are made based on incomplete evidence.