When we read an annual report of the company the CEO who is a victim of this bias described success due to his skills, better decisions, etc. When things go wrong then he blames the economic slowdown, corona, government policy, weather problems, etc.

We attribute success to ourselves and failures to external factors. This is the self-serving bias.

Similar to fund managers, I have met a few so-called fund managers in the early days of my career who have given entire credit of good return to their skills during the bull phase of the market and when the market started falling then they started blaming the market for the poor return. They keep on changing their benchmark as per their performance so that they can easily blame the market.

Try to know your strength, weaknesses and start to work on them rather than give credit to own or blame others. This will help us to improve ourselves more effectively. When we come out from the blame game and start working on ourselves then only, we can develop ourselves otherwise our life will remain miserable. We should have a record of each decision so that we can timely analyze it and learn from our own mistakes. We cannot say a ship captain is good while he can help ship to drive safely in good weather but a good captain will be one who can help ship to drive safely in the worst weather conditions. So always work on developing your knowledge, process.

This entire series will be reviewed with various examples from books which are “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “The Art of Thinking Clearly“.