Stop Worshipping Winners: Success Lies, Failure Teaches

I used to believe that success could be copied.

I used to believe that success could be copied. That if I read enough biographies of billionaires, toppers, and corporate giants, I could unlock the hidden formula. I devoured those glossy success stories… but I didn’t learn from failure. Instead, I got delusional.

Instead of clarity, I ended up with illusions. I overestimated my abilities. I underestimated how much of life is luck, timing, and circumstance.

Reality hit me harder than any motivational high.

Why industries study failure, not success

Look at the fields where the cost of mistakes is life and death.

• Aviation. Every crash is dissected down to the last nut and bolt. Entire safety systems are built from failures. That’s why flying is safer today than it was fifty years ago.

  
  

• Medicine. Pandemics, outbreaks, and surgical errors drive entire shifts in protocol. Doctors learn more from what went wrong than what went right.

  
  

• Cybersecurity. Malware attacks are painful but necessary teachers. Every breach leaves a scar in the system - and a fix. Apple’s iOS is strong today because every past failure was patched.

  
  

• Manufacturing. Almost all factories classify defects, do root cause analysis, and install process controls and specification changes to avoid them in the future.

These industries don’t glorify the smooth flights, the routine surgeries, the days without a hack. They turn scars into blueprints.

And it works.

So why don’t we, as human beings, do the same?

Our obsession with winners

From childhood, we’re told to “learn from the toppers.”

The A1 student. The gold medalist. The billionaire founder.

We binge on their stories. We buy their books. We listen to their talks. We convince ourselves that if we follow their footsteps, we’ll reach the same destination.

But most of those stories are either incomplete or fabricated. A billionaire doesn’t actually know which of his decisions mattered and which were just noise. A topper doesn’t always understand why she scored higher - maybe it was one lucky guess, or a teacher who gave her an edge.

Success is visible. Failure is hidden. That’s the trap.

The science behind the trap

Our obsession isn’t random. Both evolution and psychology push us toward winners.

Evolutionary wiring

Imagine a small tribe, thousands of years ago.The hunter who brought back food became the model everyone copied. Following him meant survival.The hunter who failed disappeared - along with anyone who followed his methods.So our brains developed a bias: track winners, ignore losers.

That shortcut worked in the wild. It doesn’t work in modern life.

Psychological wiring

• Aspirational bias. Success stories trigger dopamine, the chemical of hope. They feel good to consume.

• Survivorship bias. We only see the winners because they’re the ones alive, speaking, writing books. The failures are invisible.

• Ego protection. Failure stories sting too close. They remind us of our own wounds, so we avoid them. Success lets us dream without pain.

• Cultural conditioning. Schools, media, religions - all glorify winners. It’s drilled into us from day one.

Together, these forces explain why we chase winners, even when the lessons are hollow.

The cost of only listening to winners

The danger isn’t just wasted time on self-help books. It’s deeper.

When we only consume success stories, we:

• Overestimate our chances. We assume that if one person made it, so can we. The reality: most don’t.

• Underestimate failure. We ignore the scars that could save us from bleeding.

• Fall into inflated optimism. Gurus pump us up, but the crash afterward is brutal.

Meanwhile, the failed founder, the bankrupt businessman, the rejected artist — they’re silent. Stigmatized. Hidden. We never hear their stories, even though they contain the most practical lessons.

That silence keeps us trapped.

The problem with success stories

Do you really expect a successful businessman to tell you all his secrets?

Will he share them freely, knowing he might create competition next year? Especially if those secrets were acquired over decades, sometimes across generations? Of course not.

And most of the time, he doesn’t even know the real cause of his success. He may believe that exporting to Europe changed his fortune. But in reality, he might be wrong — or only partly right.

So what happens?He shares the already established “fake smart” reasons. They sound clever, but they aren’t the truth. Millions of success-hungry people devour those stories - and get misled. The result? More illusions. More wasted years.

What I learned the hard way

When I chased success stories, I was chasing shadows.

The billionaire’s formula didn’t work for me. The topper’s tricks didn’t fit my life. The motivational seminars only left me high for a day and empty the next.

My real lessons came from scars. From the failed projects I buried. From the job rejections that forced me to rethink. From the setbacks I didn’t want to talk about.

Failures don’t look glamorous. They don’t sell books. But they leave the kind of lessons that stick.

The shift we need

If aviation can become the safest mode of travel by dissecting every crash, why can’t we apply the same principle to our own lives?

If classifying and studying defects has made companies reach near-Six Sigma levels of process optimization, why should an engineer chase successes?

Imagine if we openly shared failures. If bankruptcy wasn’t stigma but data. If rejection letters were case studies. If mistakes weren’t buried, but dissected for everyone’s survival.

We would learn faster. We would bleed less. But first, we have to admit the truth:

Success stories inflate dreams.

Failure stories teach survival.

And if you ignore the scars, you never learn how not to bleed.

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