[mwfunk]

Very true. It's a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would read the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed businesses, products, movements, governments, etc.

It's the whole "success hides failure" problem. It's really tempting to assume that everything a successful person or company does contributes to their success, but the truth is closer to, they did 10 things right and 9 things wrong. But it's difficult or impossible to determine which is which, hence the cargo-culting.

Even more frustrating is working for a successful company, because anybody who advocates change can be shot down with the argument that everything is going well therefore that's empirical proof that the thing you want to change is clearly just fine and dandy.

Ultimately the best we can do as individuals is to cultivate an innate sense of skepticism in all things, avoid reductivism, never drink our own Kool-Aid, and never fall into the trap of thinking that we've figured it all out and don't need to think and grow anymore.

[stdbrouw]

> Very true. It's a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would read the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed businesses, products, movements, governments, etc.

Survivorship bias actually works both ways: by studying only the failures you are quite likely to misunderstand what made them fail and you might zero in on characteristics that are actually shared by many successful businesses.