The success stories are quietly lying to you

A success story can sound like a recipe, step one, step two, step three, but it almost always hides the much larger group of people who tried the exact same steps and failed anyway, then disappeared from the record instead of writing a book about it. This is survivorship bias: the visible sample, the winners who are still around to tell the story, looks more instructive than it actually is, because it is missing every case where the same approach did not work. A classic version of this comes from World War II: engineers wanted to reinforce the parts of returning planes with the most bullet holes, until statistician Abraham Wald pointed out that the planes that never returned were hit somewhere else entirely, and that missing data was the more important evidence. Before copying a success story, the useful question is whether the people who failed did the same thing, not just whether the winner did.