Remember: Correlation does not imply causation

[andywarburton]

Hey folks. Almost every day in this forum I see posts like "Fiverr did X and then my sales dropped".

It's easy to assume that because one thing happened it caused the other, but that is not always the case. 

For example, when Fiverr introduced the success score your sales dropped. The two *could* be related or it could be that your niche got flooded with new sellers or one of your competitors dropped their prices, or some other sellers got promoted to a higher rank, or a competitor changed their gig iamges, or you got a bad private review.

If you assume the cause, it stops you from looking for alternatives and potentially finding the real cause of your sales drop. Which might just be something you can fix!

Correlation does not imply causation on Wikipedia for those who want to read more.

[priyank_mod]

Most people's thought process is quite LINEAR and for them, everything works on the action-reaction philosophy.  (I'm just doing a silly over-simplification of your idea)

Like, most people believe that good/bad deeds bring good/bad consequences or hard work always results into success. And pretty much all the time, they fail to acknowledge other variables which play critical roles in anything and everything we do in our life. 🙂 Specifically in Fiverr's case - no one tries to look inward and see if they might have been committing mistakes unintentionally but it is convenient to blame the system. 

PS I wish we all were taught basics of Chaos Theory at school - if not for anything, at least it would have helped everyone in developing a broader perspective. 

[puspojit_biswas]

Nice! It is pretty much philosophic things here. 🙂 I liked it.

A person is born with his/her brain. Mostly the surroundings and his/her day-to-day experiences help him/her to create a belief system in his/her mind gradually. The most important feature of that belief system is that the person does not question his/her belief system normally. If the person is failed anyways, people will scold him/her. If he is succeded, the same people will praise him/her. 🙂 Maybe this is one of the reasons why we never want to fail in any way, even though we know that "Failure is the pillar of success!" If we fail, our belief system does not like to accept it. Look for the reasons, and naturally, we do not like to accept our faults. We always try to find out some reasons that are not under our control and blame the fortune simultaneously. Do you think it is a good idea to blame the things that are out of our control? 

If you fail, you should be open-minded first and find all the possible reasons for that failure. Eliminate all the reasons that are out of your control. Focus on the rest of the reasons and think about how you may update and upgrade yourself. I never say 'Try harder', I ask to 'Try your best', 'Do smart work', and 'Never give up.' 

Here, I would like to share 3 important lessons in my life.

• Things take time to happen
• Never push yourself too hard
• I do not know everything

I am excited to know your learnings too. Thank you all.