Survivorship bias

Everyone who succeeded at dropshipping made a video about it. The far larger number who lost money did not. So the visible evidence describes a success rate that does not exist.

It is the single biggest distortion in wealth-building advice. Whenever you see a strategy that looks reliable, ask what the denominator was - how many people tried this and what happened to them.

Put a denominator on it. Suppose a thousand people start the same online business this year and thirty reach a real income from it. Every one of those thirty has a reason to tell you about it, and none of the nine hundred and seventy has any reason to post at all. What you see is thirty successes in a row. The honest description of the same year is a 3% success rate.

The practical version is a question to ask before starting anything: what does failure look like here, how common is it, and what does it cost? If you cannot answer, you have read the winners and nothing else. Closure rates, marketplaces full of businesses selling for less than was put into them, and abandoned channels are all the same data, and all of it is public.