Let’s stop trying to learn from success

Ten tips to become a better programmer. Ten tips for running a company like Steve Jobs. Ten tips guaranteed to get you a girl. Ten tips for making your startup succeed. All stamped “guaranteed” and preferably backed by an iconic brand. You’ve probably run into a flood of articles that try to give you the short version of supposedly tried-and-tested advice. Success stories draw people in. Most of this advice is worth little, though, and I don’t read those articles myself.

You can take inspiration from someone else’s success, but what worked for one person is very unlikely to work for another. Every success, and more precisely the path to it, is unique. Doing the same things gives you no guarantee of the same result.

The trouble with advice distilled from success stories is that it’s taken out of context. Or rather, it only works in a particular context. If you go out and start an online store that sells everything, you’re unlikely to become the next Amazon. You can read a thousand and one articles about what Steve Bazos does and it won’t change that. Every success story takes place in circumstances that tend to be unique. You may not like hearing it, but you’ll need luck too, however you define it. Timing, colleagues, favorable stock-market conditions, and so on. Luck may play a bigger role than you’d like.

I think I first read this in the book Why we fail. Studying success matters, but studying failure matters much more because it tends to depend less on context. Mistakes are transferable, and across all those setbacks and failures you can find common patterns. For better or worse, we’re hardwired to look for patterns in what worked. Success draws us in and motivates us. Failure is where we learn.