the.com/early bird gets the worm
Survivorship bias disguised as a proverb, written by morning people, never the worm.
means A saying urging that acting first or arriving earliest brings the best rewards, before others claim them.
from First recorded in English proverb collections in the 1600s, built on the plain farmyard image of a bird that rises at dawn and so gets first pick of the worms surfacing in the morning soil. It spread as shorthand for the virtue of promptness, later stretched into the fuller wink 'the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese' — a modern addition pointing out that the first one through isn't always the lucky one.
- origin
- first recorded in 1605, John Ray proverb collection
- missing half
- second mouse gets the cheese, less popular
- worm perspective
- the lesson is actually stay underground
- science check
- chronotype is largely genetic, not moral virtue