What about those who failed?

I am currently reading a book about how in order to succed you need to do everything 10 times more than the average person.

Of course, that’s what the author did and worked for him and he has seen the same in other successful people. It is still unclear to me how he feels about quality, but it is clear that the quantity has to be 10 times more than average. (I do challenge you to think about what that would mean if we would all follow his advice)

Recently, I came across the story of the study done in world war II on planes that returned from fights with bullet wholes. The army thought about reinforcing those areas, until the mathematician Abraham Wald observed that those were the planes that made it back and that the other areas without bullet wholes should be armoured as planes did not survive hits to these places. This has been named the survivorship bias and we still suffer from it and make decisions completely anaware that they fall under this error.

I would be interested in a book about people that work 10 times more then the average person (even to fullfil their own dream, not in someone else’s company because there are those people too, but let’s say they aren’t putting their effort where the author says) and that have still failed. They are surely so much more than those who have succeeded and it would be interesting to know of they have something in common. I would suspect that they gave up somewhere along the way and those that have succeeded didn’t. However, what do you do when you run out of energy? How many fails have had the ones who succeded before they made it as opposed to those who failed? There is so much to consider.

Of course, the author is an entrepreneur, not a psychologist and does not consider the human mind at all, but generally self help books are treating whatever they talk about as if all people are the same and what works for one works for all. People are not planes, that’s for sure. It would still be interesting to read a book about people* that were unsuccessful thought they reallt tried and did everything “right”.

*not just one case, but several and studied objectively, not a book about someone who failed and thought to share their story so “others wouldn’t make the same mistakes”.