Want to be successful? Then you have to learn from mistakes

About 'successful success'

Have you ever wondered why popular books on how to become a millionaire never make any of their readers a millionaire?

Why do successful companies like Apple, MicroSoft, Alphabet, and Netflix appear once a decade even though their success stories have been seen, studied, and even filmed?

The answer is simple:

- Any success story is always about luck (!), with the most valuable information remaining in the minds of those who failed to succeed.

This phenomenon was first described during World War II.

Mathematician Abraham Wald studied the location of holes received by American bombers during combat missions.

The wings, stabilizers, and fuselage were most often hit by enemy fire, while the cockpit, engines, and fuel system received the fewest holes. It would seem that the places that had suffered the most damage should be reinforced, but Wald decided otherwise.

He correctly assumed that the very fact that the aircraft was able to return to the base with such damage meant that it was not critical, and that it was necessary to strengthen the parts of the hull that remained intact.

This conclusion was confirmed after the war ended when downed planes were recovered from forests and swamps.

It turned out that they had been damaged in the places Wald had mentioned: the engines, fuel system, and cockpit.

With such damage, the plane could not fly: either the pilot would be killed, all the fuel would leak out, or the engine would jam, but the base did not and could not know about all this because the plane simply did not reach it.

As a result, the engineers collected all the statistical information about the damage from the returning planes, but there was no information about the lost machines.

We see the same mistake in the business environment.

People strive to study the biographies of successful businessmen thoroughly, attend their trainings, and buy their books on how to succeed. However, even if they follow all this advice exactly, they do not succeed.

The reason is the same as in the case of the Wald bombers: millionaires' books contain the most useless piece of information, namely what to do and how to behave when conditions are most favorable.

There is not a word in these books about what to do when everything turns against you.

The most useful information comes from people who have tried to build a business and failed, but they don't write books. But even if they did, no one would buy them.

The statistics are inexorable: 90 to 95% of all businesses fail in the first five years, and another 80% of those that stay afloat in the next five years.

As a result, after 10 years, only 1-2% of startups have a sustainable business, while the rest are ruined.

And the 1-2% who stayed afloat did so not because they did everything better than everyone else or calculated all the risks in advance, but simply because they were in the right place at the right time.

They will not be able to repeat their success from scratch, and in science, an experiment that cannot be repeated using the same sequence of actions is called a fluke.

The conclusion

1. Analyze other people's mistakes. You can't have someone else's success.

2. Do not give up. All successful people have gone through losses and failures more than once

3. Create your own story and your own success. It is yours only.

Here is my own story

When I was doing an internship at a Swiss private pension fund, I was surprised by the age of the portfolio managers: all of them were well over 50 years old (!).

My managers were 25 years old at the time.

When I asked why there were no younger people in the team, I was told, "Each of our managers has lived through at least two (!) economic crises."

They are not afraid of them, they know how to recognize them, how to go through them with minimal losses without making mistakes, and how to get out of them correctly..."

That was 2006.

And then came my year, 2008. I remember our losses well and how we got out of that crisis.

By the way, the company's strategy, which was updated at that time, created a number of new businesses that are still successfully operating today.

In that crisis period, we helped our clients to go through this time with minimal losses and quickly take leadership positions after the crisis.

What else is worth adding

The success of each country is also unique and there is no point in blindly copying solutions. Ukraine's success will be the result of our own path and our own "Project Ukraine"!

Read, draw conclusions, look not only at the successful experience of others but also build your own success story!