What’s better, learning from Ws or Ls?

The hidden assumption of most business books is that if you learn from the Winners and do what they did, you will win, too.

This way of thinking has a major problem, and it’s not just survivorship bias. It’s that when you study winners, it is hard to know what exactly, out of everything they did, made them win. You might study your favorite author, imitate their writing in all its details, and still fail to publish a bestseller – because writing a good book is only part of what’s required to become a successful writer.

Instead, a better approach is to study the Losers. Who wrote a great book yet failed to become a bestselling author? What obstacle did they fail to overcome, and how can you prevent the same mistake? For example, did they not learn how to produce a compelling book proposal? Did they not learn how to build an audience?

Of course, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. You can learn from Winners and Losers.

In fact, unless you learn from both Winners and Losers, you will not know whether you’re learning lessons you can rely upon.

It won’t do you much good to learn a strategy used by winners if it’s also used by losers. Unless you truly understand both what makes the winners win and what makes the losers lose, you don’t know whether you will end up a member of the former or the latter.

Don’t be like them.

Constantly ask yourself, how did people who pursued the same goal as me fail? And what can I do to avoid the same mistake?

If you do, you will realize that winning reliably is often more complex than apparent. There’s not just one thing you must do right. There are plenty of things you must do right. You must have hard and soft skills. You must be good at your craft and at building relationships. You must work hard and manage your health.

Fail to do any of them and the rest might not matter.

As many losers discovered.

And as you might learn from them.