Amen! I've found that 9 times out of 10 successful people follow the same advice and believe the same things as unsuccessful people (at least they SAY they do). So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet followed the same advice.
On top of the survivorship bias I would add the fundamental attribution error, or a close cousin to it. Our stories about successful people tend to attribute their success to inherent qualities and under-emphasize the role of their environment, especially just getting lucky.
Yes—the wealthy sympathetic parent. This is always left out of the speeches.
It’s not a hard equation. The wealthy can afford to take risks. They want their kids to succeed. Can take care of that marginal DUI. I could fill up a page of entitlements?
They know important people, or have the money, to influence important people. They can get their kids out of trouble. Can pay for schooling. Can risk money on multiple business/career ideas.
I grew up with Gavin Newsom. Went to the same high school. He was voted “Most Fashionable”. If this guy didn’t have that powerful, wealthy family, there is no way he would be where he is now. His younger year screwups, and learning difficulties, would have hobbled most of us for life. (I like Gavin. I think he’s a good guy. I’m just using him as an example. Marin County has many fine examples of wealthy kids getting ahead, but figured most of you wouldn’t know them.)
I grew up in a wealthy enclave, and pretty much every successful kid had a wealthy encouraging parent. A few middle class kids came out as good financially as dad if they went into his line of business, and didn’t work at screwing it up when “finding themself” in their 20-30’s.
A few low income kids succeeded if they finished college, and got a professional degree.
(I don’t equate success with money, or career. Some of the worst people I know are considered successful.)
After reading a few business books I noticed that everyone uses the same case studies (i.e. Toyota) but claims the companies were successful because of the title of the book I happen to be reading.
If I understand, we are talking about a very narrow definition of success and failure here, professional success which is recognition, fame and riches? That seems to be a rare product of being lucky; where what you like doing and what you have an aptitude for, is exactly what's needed by the society in the field you're working in. Then you need to know the right people and be in the right place to get the recognition for it. All these things need to align, so it doesn't surprise me that these are rare events. And if you do happen to be one of the successful people it often deludes you to think it had something to do with YOU, rather than it mostly being a product of all the circumstantial things beyond you.
Well put! But I do think there are people who are uniquely skilled at seeing things align around them and using it to their advantage, and that can take place is any context, not just professional success.
I think the important bit is to pay attention to what the successful do differently from common sense advice, not the bits that everyone follows. For example, Elon Musk's housing choices when traveling, Steve Jobs' higher education, Tesla's approaches to thinking.
I don't think those are the defining factors of why they got famous or successful out of all the highly intelligent and hard working people out there. The fact that they got famous brings light to their ideas, which makes you think there's something special about them.
You'd be surprised to find many many many highly intelligent people out there with clever way of doing things, and I'd argue no less intelligent than elon musk or jobs or any other famous person. Our culture right now worships successfuly entrepreneurs as Gods with amazing brains who cracked the problem, but really it's more of luck and being at the right place at the right time.
I certainly think it's worth trying them. And I believe in trying anything three times before giving up.
I think the quirky information which you have to dig up is much more likely to be the "secret sauce" than the all-to-familiar stuff which almost everyone is doing.
> So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet followed the same advice.
Both are useful, yes. With no evidence, what-so-ever, my gut is that both are a lot less useful than we give them credit for. My Dad is a success by most of societies measures (and all of my own). A biography of his life couldn't possibly share enough advice to teach someone else to be successful. I could do it pretty easily: Work harder than you are capable of, then harder than that, and do so without a paycheck (but with a very large mortgage) for a few years while still managing to pay your employees. You'll be driving over to your office every 2.5 hours to change paper in your color printer to print paper catalogues (at 2:00 AM, 4:30 AM ...) so you won't be sleeping a lot the first few years, and you'll do so on the family-room floor because getting up and down all night long isn't going to work for Mom.
Meanwhile, once a month or so, have some crisis happen that threatens to shut the place down. Do this for several years until your customers -- all of whom have far less faith in your company continuing to exist (in a space where that's really important) -- are finally willing to send orders big enough your way for you to get any financial benefit from the work you're doing (and give most of it to your tireless staff who -- while paid on time every month -- went without raises for a long time and barely complained[0]). It was 90% struggle, 90% problems, solving one at a time, moving on to the next, and never getting overwhelmed. Unsurprisingly, he was also a very good small plane pilot (IFR/Weather and a mess of others; he flew multiple times/week often cross-country with a breathing mask hooked up to a tank due to the altitude and lack of pressurization on a Cherokee).
So basically my lesson was that in order to be successful, you have to suffer for a long time, work harder than you're capable of at the peek of your health, and if you can figure out all of the problems while still providing something your customers want, you'll be successful. The first two parts are almost always "minimum requirements" -- there is the occasional "lazy genius" and the more frequent "trust-fund successful", but if you're starting at 19 years old, newly married out of high school (no kids) doing construction, you're very unlikely to become wealthy without a lot of hard work (outside of the lottery/similar luck-related ventures that don't serve any educational value to the consumer). As irony would have it, the story of my Dad's life is one of the (smaller) reasons I chose to work for someone rather than run a business[1].
I think most of us watch/read these things more for the entertainment value. Perhaps I tell myself it's learning, but it's a mix of curiosity and voyeurism. But nobody has to tell me watching a biography about a successful person means "success is easy" or more common than failure. I've watched, participated in, read about or seen on TV nearly every form of failure there is. Thankfully the "participated in" category isn't as bad as it could be.
[0] It's hard to complain when the owner will pull crap out of a toilet with his bare hands before asking an employee to find a plunger, can and does do any job on the factory floor and seemingly lives at the place. There wasn't a menial task below him and he'd take it if someone could do the more important job better ... he was always a humble guy.
[1] I'm not afraid of hard work -- it was mostly about what he had to work on and knowledge (from a brief stint running my own business) that if I had to do that with the majority of my time, I'd be miserable. The products/services my Dad's business sold weren't "his life's passion" even though what he provided was extremely important to his customers and ultimately, anyone who drives a car. Running the business, managing the finances, and making "the machine" operate were his life's passions, so spending almost all of his time on finances/growing the business was what drove him.
There are, of course, lots of ways to define success, but if you're talking about running a business then your Dad's experience largely matches what I've seen in my professional life (small business).
The interesting thing to me is that the desire to work that hard, and sacrifice that much, is largely an innate trait, not a conscience decision (at least that's been what I've seen). And the people who struggle the most are not those who work the most but who are torn because they WANT one thing but lack the inherent traits required to do it.
Personally, I don't think that professional success and money are good reasons to work that hard. Working that hard is gratifying in and of itself (to some people) because it teaches you things about the world, helps forge relationships with people, and forces you to develop skills you didn't know would benefit you later in life.
