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The issue with Survivor Bias is that we don't really have other great guides for doing startups. It's natural to ask a great writer what they did to get published or a programmer what they did to build their first app. While we should take the retrospective stories of winners with a grain of salt, there's probably more good than bad to be gained from following what has worked.

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Isn't the point of the article that we do have other great guides, the failures. They are a great example of how things when wrong. Maybe by paying closer attention to the failures we can see how to fix what they did wrong and fix it.

Well the issue with "fixing failures" is the same as "following success". You don't know how many people did what the failures did and succeeded - and even if the actions the failures took were wrong, it's unclear what exactly are the right actions to take.

Yeah, I think the biggest danger is paying too much attention to what other people are doing. It's not that you can't learn from success or failure, but these days that information is far too accessible. The talent and conditions that lead to success in one case are probably completely inactionable for anyone else by the time the story is told.

What you really need is to hone your ability to recognize success and failure on a minute-by-minute basis in your own startup.

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