We don't write case studies on the hundreds of companies that failed while trying similar playbooks. We incorrectly attribute success to the visible strategies of survivors (like an org model) while ignoring luck, timing, and funding, which are often the real differentiators.

In domains with extreme outcomes (music, startups), success is heavily influenced by luck, making it difficult to replicate. A more effective strategy is to study the common failure modes of the vast majority of talented people who tried. This provides a clearer roadmap of what to avoid than trying to copy a lucky winner.

Success can arise from luck, high volume, innate advantages, or changing the odds. Many famous stories, like Marilyn Monroe's discovery, are based on luck. Attempting to replicate such a path is an unreliable strategy; focus on controllable systems you can influence instead.

Successful individuals and companies don't experience more fortunate events. Instead, they excel at capitalizing on positive serendipity and navigating negative shocks. The narrative of "luck" is often a psychological crutch for those unwilling to take responsibility for their reactions to life's inherent volatility.

When evaluating others' success, ask if their strategy would work for most people who adopt it, or if it relied heavily on luck. If a strategy isn't reproducible and leaves many casualties behind, it's not a model to be learned from, regardless of the impressive outlier outcome.

Disagreeing with Peter Thiel, Josh Wolf argues that studying people who made willful mistakes is more valuable than studying success stories. Analyzing failures provides a clear catalog of what to avoid, offering a more practical and robust learning framework based on inversion.

It's a mistake to copy the current habits of highly successful people. Their present behavior is a result of their success. Instead, model the hustling, risk-taking strategies they employed when they were in a similar position to you.

Contrary to the popular trope, you learn far more from success than from failure. It's more informative to see how things are done right than to analyze what went wrong. To accelerate your career, you should prioritize joining a winning team to observe and internalize successful patterns.

Advice from successful individuals often reflects their current position of luxury and flexibility, not the grueling, unbalanced methods they used to get there. To achieve similar success, emulate what your heroes did when they were at your stage, not the balanced approach they can afford now.