“If you only take the advice of the so-called successful people and ignore all the failures, you’re going to be left with a heavily distorted view of reality.”
This animated video offers a simple explanation of “survivorship bias,” which is what happens when we overestimate the advice of people who succeed while ignoring the failures of people who followed that same advice.
It suggests no one really knows what it takes to be successful and that there may be more to learn from studying failure than success.