Why learn from the guy who made the mistakes when you can learn from the guy who didn't?
By contrast, things that were mistakes in the past tend to still be mistakes in the present. Usually they continue to be mistakes in the future as well. That's something you can really learn from, as you go through the creative process toward success that you were going to have to go through anyway.
As an extreme example, a lottery winner should say "you should play the lottery, it made me rich!" ignoring all of those who made an overall loss.
Think of it like the housing crash, everybody knew somebody who was getting rich from property.
Also because survivorship bias: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
EDIT: Linked to Wikipedia
How many great people never finished their works because of something completely outside of their control?
The problem is social stratification. If you're a normal person, you end up mostly around people who didn't succeed and get only half the story. If you have a break-out success (or just luck) you end up in a world where everyone has, and there's a lot of self-congratulatory just-worlding. Either way, you get a biased account.
I think it's most adaptive to learn from both sides while playing the attitude of the successful, to make yourself seem like a high-status person. You always want to seem (except to true friends whom you'd actually like to help, with accurate information) like you've had an unbroken chain of successes and can't imagine anything else; you just don't want that to bleed into self-deception. Maybe the reason why psychopaths do so well in life is that they're most resistant against cognitive dissonance. It's easy for them to maintain a successful front without falling into self-deception or delusion. For everyone else, there's nonzero cognitive load in doing that.
Do they?
The serial killers are the lower classes of psychopaths, usually with other mental issues.
They don't all become CEOs but they generally rise to the highest level permissible by their intelligence. An 80-IQ psychopath isn't going to rise to the top of a bank, but he will end up in a position of power over other people.
Of course, they blow themselves up every few years or so, but they usually move away unharmed.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-som...
By the time they're adults, psychopaths have a wealth of social experience and knowledge, often gained from high-pressure social situations they created at a rate exceeding what most people would ever encounter. When they want something, they're very good at playing to win.
The prehistoric context was that developing an outsized social ability enabled someone to have an above-normal number of sexual encounters. The lack of emotional attachment and compassion, likewise, keeps them from pair-bonding and slows down their proliferation.
In the work context, organizations are also r- or K-selective (quantity vs. quality) in how they replicate process. Get-big-or-die companies are r-strategists, while "lifestyle businesses" tend to be K-strategic. As the business world becomes increasingly r-strategic, so does the character of people running it.
The meaning of "success" is subjective. Don't self-deceive yourself into adopting somebody else's definition of "success". Peter Theil has a vested interest in you adopting success criteria that will ultimately enrich him. (That isn't a criticism)
I had a friend who was a priest. He owned almost nothing, and probably had less than $5,000 to his name. His vision of success was helping people who were indigent, incorrigible or otherwise considered broken by society. Was he a failure?