Built to Last?
Should you learn from the success of others
These days I’m reading what appears to be a fantastic book by Daniel Kahneman, called “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. It’s about how the intuitive and analytical minds think and interact. It’s about statistics and the fallacies of our minds with regards to statistical intuition and other thinking fallacies. Many of those are related to financial and business aspects.
The quotes in the image are just a sample of quotes from one chapter. These specifically refer to the efficacy, or rather lack of thereof, of a specific kind of business books, those that try to teach the readers how to be successful in business by analyzing previous successful businesses, as if their management was somehow especially smart. The thing, as Kahneman explains, is that luck plays a much more important role than a specific CEO’s abilities are and eventually, over time, the companies come to some middle ground because luck averages out.
Previously, I loved reading these books, like “Founders at Work” by Jessica Livingston. Don’t get me wrong, this book is very fun to read, the stories are interesting, especially to those who are interested in the early days of computing and the Internet. Yet, I don’t think I got any real advice from it that could help my software business and Kahneman’s book is emphasizing that one shouldn’t even look for actionable advice from these kind of stories. Because most of the success is because of luck.
In short, read the quotes. Better yet, get the book.
