Our judgment is always clouded by survivorship bias, the emergence of self help social media, has only magnified it. Its one of the the main point in books by Nassim Taleb. One of the strategies he suggests is to to pursue a dual strategy where you invest 20 - 30 % of resources ( effort, time or money) in High Risk - High Reward strategy while keeping rest 70 - 80% in low risk.

Personally I pay a lot of attention to stories on HN when they mention failure (complete and not just cosmetic how we failed and then won type stories).