Decision-Making
The Illusion of the "Everywhere Millionaire"
Extreme success stories trick us into ignoring underlying probabilities.
Updated September 18, 2026 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Key points
- People often misjudge a person's job by relying on descriptive traits while ignoring base rate probabilities.
- Success stories focusing on the "winner" miss how rare it is to get there.
- Major life choices should not rely on outlier success stories that ignore basic odds.
In my cognitive psychology class, there’s a section on reasoning and problem-solving where I always ask students to answer a question. It’s a demo originally used by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but with very little interest in people or in the world of reality. A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure, and a passion for detail.
Is he a physician, farmer, salesperson, or librarian?
When I ask students in my class, the overwhelming majority answer "librarian." Why? Because Steve is a meek and tidy soul. He’s introverted. He has his own world. Librarians presumably like to be organized, because you have to organize the books in the stacks. They tend to be quiet and introverted because they like books. So Steve must be a librarian.
The better bet is "salesperson." Why? Because there aren’t a lot of librarian jobs. There are about 140,000 librarians in the United States and more than 13 million people working in sales. Students still say librarian. Why is that?
They pick Steve based on what he is like and ignore how many people hold each job. They’re going by the diagnostic information, the information about the individual, and not the probability that someone holds that job.
The Temptation of Outlier Narratives
Recently, Apple News has been playing a similar trick, though not exactly the same—it keeps feeding me this story in The Wall Street Journal about Everywhere Millionaires.
It’s adapted from a book by two economists. They even have a picture of Dick Portillo. He started a hot dog business, sold it for a billion dollars, and now owns a yacht. They call them Everywhere Millionaires because they’re in every town, running ordinary businesses like HVAC contractors, vet practices, and local restaurant chains. But they’re everyday people. They didn’t do some kind of self-driving car or a rocket ship or new software that everybody owns. In the case of Dick Portillo, he just started a hot dog business.
The message is a nice one. You don’t have to do something incredibly fancy to live a life of wealth. You can start a small business and, over time, be very wealthy and live extremely well. But here’s the catch.
Steve and Dick are the same faulty reasoning running in opposite directions. In the case of Steve, people think he should be a librarian because he fits the description. They forget to think about how many people have the job. In the case of Dick, people look at the result—his wealth. What they don’t think about is how likely it is that someone who opens a hot dog stand eventually sells it for a billion dollars. They are both neglecting the underlying probability of an event. And in both cases, the probabilities are very low.
Uncovering Survivor Bias
I kept reading and reading, because it reminded me of an article I wrote, “The Sample Is Already Sorted.” So I kept reading until they finally told me how many of these Everywhere Millionaires there are. Three million, in a country of about 340 million people. Depending on whether you count people or households, that’s somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 50. That means out of every hundred people you see, one or two of them will be like this.
So some of those three million might be sitting a few rows behind you at your son’s game. At a ballpark with 40,000 people, that’s a few hundred of them. The authors say one of them might be coaching your kid’s soccer team. That’s probably true. Dick Portillo won’t be. He’s on a 130-foot yacht called Top Dog, docked behind his house in Naples, Florida. He’s not a typical Everywhere Millionaire. He’s the far end of the tail, and that’s the one they put in the picture.
Opening a business is easy. You can file the paperwork to get an LLC, or whatever mechanism you want to use, and with that, you can open a business. But then that business has to survive, and roughly a third of businesses survive 10 years. Dick Portillo’s business survived 50 years.
When we start with a successful millionaire like Portillo and go back in time, it becomes easy to trace what steps led to what result. But the question is, how many people also went down the same path and were not successful? How many decided to take other jobs, drive an Uber, or work at a coffee shop? The answer is, we don’t know.
Evaluating Base Rates
To be fair, the authors are economists, and they know about base rates. They point out that most successful founders come from poor or middle-class families, simply because there are so many more people in the bottom 99 percent than in the top one percent. That’s the Steve problem, solved correctly. But notice in which direction they follow it. They start with the founders and ask where they came from. In this essay, they never start with everyone who tried and ask how many made it. They tell us a rich kid has six times the chance of starting a successful business as a poor kid. Six times what? They don’t say.
So we can go back to Steve and my classroom example. Let’s imagine that Steve really is a librarian. If you only looked at librarians, you’d find plenty of meek and tidy souls who love books and have a strong inner world, and you’d conclude that’s the path to being a librarian. The thought experiment turns it around for us. Most meek and tidy souls aren’t librarians. And most people who open a hot dog stand never sell it for a billion dollars. The essay ends by saying someone has to build these businesses, and “it might as well be you.” Maybe. If you love hot dogs, or just had the wild idea of opening one, by all means follow your instinct. But don’t expect the yacht. In other words, don’t take life-changing advice based on a story in The Wall Street Journal.