Success stories are not the whole sample

A shelf of business triumphs can make certain habits look inevitable: boldness, concentration, refusal to quit. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's warning is that the archive is selected by survival. People who took similar risks and disappeared are less likely to publish a method, give a keynote or become the example from which rules are drawn.

This does not mean success is random or that skill is imaginary. It means a visible winner cannot, alone, reveal how often the same approach failed. The corrective is not cynicism but a better denominator: ask who else began, under what conditions, and who is missing when a pattern is declared.