The problem with reading "winners" is the huge survivorship bias, and autobiographies are inevitably biased towards showing the author in a good light.

What exactly isn't survivorship bias?

Everything can be put in that bucket. Being born without autism, becoming a doctor, engineer, start-up founder, successful athlete et al.

They can all be abstracted as lottery tickets.

I think the survivorship bias arguments sweeps under the rug the fact that we might be able to learn something from successful people.

I think the point is that the “lessons” from these books suffer from bias.

Sam Walton might say “this was the reason Walmart succeeded”, but plenty of people do the same thing and fail.

So what’s the lesson?

Well, things like law school & medical school have high rates of failure.

So if one of the successful that passed the bar & became doctors people say "They studied hard" — yet many failed, even when the also studied. Does that nullify the value of "studying hard"?

We know what the rates of failure are. We know that studying hard does not guarantee success and what the level of risk is.

We have no idea how many people tried to do the same thing as highly successful businesses and failed. We know that luck or resourced (initial funding, contacts, timing) not available to most people have played a part in many success stories. We know that things could have gone badly wrong for them (e.g. Richard Branson's family had to put up a lot of money including a £70k fine to avoid a prosecution for tax dodging). We know that the rate of failures in businesses (especially ambitious high risk high high risk high reward ones) is far higher than in medical school or law school.

All that makes survivourship bias a lot more relevant

>We know that studying hard does not guarantee success and what the level of risk is.

That's exactly my point even though the survivorship bias is higher or lower.

We shouldn't discredit advice from successful people on the grounds of survivaship bias. We should only discredit advice on grounds of merit.

There is a subtle distinction you are missing.

The advice may have merit, but survivourship bias means it is not more credible because it comes from someone successful than the same advice from a random person.

So if you have three people.

A) One that runs a successful business.

B) One that ran a business but it failed.

C) One that have never run a business (my 5 year old).

Of A, B & C your only allowed to choose advice from one. Your saying it would not matter from which one you choose to get your advice from?

No, it doesn’t nullify it, but it’s not exactly useful info?

And your analogy is a good one. When you read many of these books the “lesson” is really obvious too - “listen to your customer” or “aggressively cut costs in your supply chain”.

Those thinks are the basics of business. Everyone is trying to do those things.

Business books are terrible in general for this reason. Even basic statistics is throw out the door in these analyses.

The best book I read is “Halo Effect” which calls all this out.