Very true. It&#x27;s a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would read the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed businesses, products, movements, governments, etc.<p>It&#x27;s the whole &quot;success hides failure&quot; problem. It&#x27;s really tempting to assume that everything a successful person or company does contributes to their success, but the truth is closer to, they did 10 things right and 9 things wrong. But it&#x27;s difficult or impossible to determine which is which, hence the cargo-culting.<p>Even more frustrating is working for a successful company, because anybody who advocates change can be shot down with the argument that everything is going well therefore that&#x27;s empirical proof that the thing you want to change is clearly just fine and dandy.<p>Ultimately the best we can do as individuals is to cultivate an innate sense of skepticism in all things, avoid reductivism, never drink our own Kool-Aid, and never fall into the trap of thinking that we&#x27;ve figured it all out and don&#x27;t need to think and grow anymore.