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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

This can't work for the obvious reason that if everybody applies these techniques, then everybody's business would grow sky-high.

They might as well sell a book on how to win the lottery.

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An economist walks down the street and sees a $20 on the ground. “That can’t be real, if it were, someone would have picked it up.”

A passerby stoops down and picks it up.

I appreciate the metaphor but it still highlights the same crux of the problem. That first passerby got the $20. The next guy that follows in his footsteps gets nothing.

But is that a problem for the first passerby? Do you not read the book because the strategies won't work in perpetuity?

> High Growth Handbook is the playbook for turning a startup into a unicorn...

No, I don't read the book because I don't like books that claim to be selling some secret sauce to success because they are often rife with survivorship bias.

Sounds like there’s a few objections: the book is so effective its techniques will be adopted by everyone, and the book is based on flawed survivorship bias so the techniques are unlikely to work.

> This can't work for the obvious reason that if everybody applies these techniques, then everybody's business would grow sky-high.

Why does this obviously not work? Lots of businesses can grow faster than they do, maybe (probably?) even most businesses.

The economy is not a zero-sum game.

Luckily the economy is a pie, not a lottery and everyone can be better off.

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