10+ Cognitive Biases that can Kill Your Startup
How your mind will trick you into making wrong decisions and what you can do about it.
People are fallible and irrational, and startup founders are no exception. We all make mistakes. As a startup founder, you’re even encouraged to make mistakes according to the ‘fail fast, fail often’ adage popularised by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup. While it is certainly true that you can learn from mistakes, as a founder you’re obliged to make sure you’re not blindly banging your head against a concrete wall of obvious errors. You don’t want to make mistakes you don’t learn from, and you don’t want to repeat mistakes made by others. You need to be able to filter the ‘interesting mistakes’ from the obvious ones.
What I so easily label here as ‘obvious mistakes’ are mistakes that are, for the most part, not obvious at all: the mistakes people make that are the result of thought errors.
We all are vulnerable to these thought errors, and to people (and marketing campaigns) that abuse them to influence us. These ‘weak spots’ in our internal logic have to do with something called cognitive bias.
