Bad News for Aspiring Gurus?

"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."

Regardless if you normally like history or not, I'd point to the Sengoku Warring States Era of Japanese history as worth studying for almost anyone who wants to be successful at anything.

All cohesive authority broke down into basically a 30-sided civil war. Thus, there's surprisingly large amounts of data about tactics, strategies, diplomacy, troop movements, alliances and betrayals, etc, etc, etc. Trying to make sense of why this guy won or that guy won goes a long way towards learning how not to make mistakes.

Here's the era -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period

Here's "the three great unifiers" - originally the latter two fought on the side of the former, until he was betrayed by one his own generals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oda_Nobunaga

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyotomi_Hideyoshi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Ieyasu

Particularly, if you can understand why the Tokugawa wound up ruling Japan for 250 years and not the Toyotomi, I think that goes a long way towards learning how not to be overexpansive. Toyotomi Hideyoshi was more impressive than Tokugawa Ieyasu through his whole life... Hideyoshi probably had 10x or maybe even 100x more excellent victories and innovations and insights.

But Ieyasu was always able to avoid the large fatal mistakes, whereas Hideyoshi made a couple of those - invading Korea shortly after conquering all of Japan but before power was consolidated, and putting his nephew to death for poor reasons.

Really, in many respects Hideyoshi was a much smarter, stronger, better man than Ieyasu, but Ieyasu avoided the overexpansiveness mistake, and thus his family went on to win in the end.

Check out Sengoku. I think most people here would find a lot of fascinating lessons from the era.

...and good news for those of us who are generally skeptical of "gurus".