Survivorship and Recall Bias in Self-Evaluation

A vivid success remains available as evidence of your skill; failed bets become less accessible or disappear altogether. You then evaluate yourself using the remembered winner as the numerator while shrinking the denominator of total attempts. This is Survivorship Bias turned inward: instead of missing failed companies or defeated competitors, you miss your own dead ends. The resulting story credits judgment for the surviving outcome without forcing skill, chance, and the full batting average to compete as explanations.

Recovering forgotten failures does not prove that you lack skill: even sound decisions can lose, and lucky decisions can win. The model corrects the sample you use for self-evaluation; it cannot, by itself, separate judgment from chance. That requires examining the reasoning and probabilities available when each decision was made.