"In 2003 he published a paper arguing that when people study success stories exclusively--as many avid devourers of business self-help books do--they come away

"In 2003 he published a paper arguing that when people study success stories exclusively--as many avid devourers of business self-help books do--they come away with a vastly oversimplified idea of what it takes to succeed. This is because success is what economists refer to as a "noisy signal." It's chancy, fickle, and composed of so many moving parts that any one is basically meaningless in the context of the real world. By studying what successful ventures have in common (persistence, for instance), people miss the invaluable lessons contained in the far more common experience of failure. They ignore the high likelihood that a company will flop--the base rate--and wind up wildly overestimating the chances of success."