SerpApi.Org
In a sweeping cultural shift, the fabled American work ethic may be getting sidelined in the quest for easy money.
For generations, Americans built wealth through accumulated skill and earned experience, the kind of success that didn’t rely on shortcuts. Now, 72 percent of Americans either have a side hustle or are considering one, with many chasing returns from crypto, prediction markets, or AI content.
Why?
Consumer prices climbed more than 20 percent from 2020 to 2024, outpacing wage growth for most Americans and widening the distance between effort and reward. Pew Research found that just 39 percent of Americans under 30 believe the so-called American Dream is still achievable through their own ambition. The rise of zero-fee platforms like Robinhood and prediction markets like Polymarket has made the potential for big paydays possible—if the bets pay off.
There’s a mechanism driving this shift that rarely gets named directly: survivorship bias. That’s the psychological mechanism where we draw conclusions about something using only a few successful examples (the survivors) while ignoring the failures (which usually outnumber the survivors).
Today, the get-rich-quick stories that circulate on social media are the survivors. And they’re rewriting how millions of people think about effort, risk, and wealth.
That distortion matters to every leader and entrepreneur, because it shapes who’s entering the workforce, what they expect from careers, and how they evaluate building something versus betting on something.
The Dream That Changed
The American Dream has always carried a clear logic: effort connects to reward. Its roots run through the Declaration of Independence and the work ethic that defined early American culture. And for much of the last two centuries, the contract felt real enough to head west to the gold rush, take loans out to go to college, or drop out of school to launch a startup.
The number of Millennials who say the dream is out of reach has quadrupled, from 9 percent in 2017 to 35 percent in 2024, according to the American Enterprise Institute. The platforms that rose to fill the void were built around the promise of quick and big returns.
Yet the reality is stark. A survey of 1,005 first-year retail crypto traders found that 84 percent lost money in their first year, with 58 percent losing nearly all of their initial investment. The Bank for International Settlements, studying Bitcoin investors across 95 countries, found that between 73 percent and 81 percent had likely lost money.
The stories that circulate never feature these numbers. Instead, we focus on success stories like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Polymarket. They’re successful regardless of whether people make or lose money because they’re essentially running the same playbook as the merchants who sold picks and shovels during the California Gold Rush.
What Durable Value Actually Looks Like
Amazon’s path to dominance was built on obsessing over customer friction and solving it relentlessly, decade after decade. Dollar Shave Club built a billion-dollar acquisition by solving a simple annoyance millions of people had quietly accepted: razors that cost too much.
The businesses that survive economic cycles solve real problems for real people. Leaders who build that way don’t need to time the market. The value they create compounds because the problems they’re solving don’t disappear when sentiment shifts. They can weather the storm, just as Amazon has done in several downturns.
Here’s how to overcome survivorship bias:
- Study base rates. When evaluating any opportunity, seek population-level data before getting sucked into individual success stories. Survivorship bias always uses anecdotal evidence to make a better business case than actually exists.
- Build for recurring problems. Sustainable businesses are built on problems that persist and need to be solved long-term. The most resilient teams create solutions customers keep choosing because their underlying need doesn’t go away.
- Define willingness to pay. While you might have a good idea, whether anyone is willing to pay for your solution is a different matter. Even businesses that generate passive income are tied to providing real value that people are willing to pay for again and again.
Passive income isn’t bad per se; in fact, it can be a solid business model. But “gambling” and “building” are two different things with two very different value sets.
This Week
Ask yourself what percentage of your business strategy is grounded in creating genuine value versus capitalizing on timing you’re hoping will hold. Then choose one initiative that deserves the slower, harder approach and commit to it.
To survive in today’s world, you need to overcome survivorship bias by creating real value for real customers.
Soren Kaplan helps leaders leapfrog to what’s next by cutting through noise, aligning faster, and making smarter decisions. He speaks at corporate events and conferences worldwide. Learn more at sorenkaplan.com. Go even deeper on this topic with Soren’s podcast on Apple, YouTube, or Spotify.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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