Success is not replicable, failure is

TL;DR — Success is not replicable. Failure is. If you ask rich and famous people how they made it, the honest ones tell you "I don't really know". Because success in a complex system is almost always the product of being in the right place at the right time, plus an initial advantage that auto-accumulates. Failure patterns, on the other hand, are stable, everywhere, repetitive. Studying those is far more useful than hanging on the lips of someone telling their climb as if it were a recipe.

I keep repeating it every day: success is not replicable, failure is. If you ask rich and famous people if they really know how they made it, the honest ones will tell you no. The others — the majority — will sell you a course, a book, a podcast, a framework. But the true answer is the first one.

In fact, more than once, the same people have tried to replicate their economic and social climb and failed to do so. Simply because the first time was a super random mix of irreproducible elements. No second attempt has ever reached the same altitude — and this should teach us something.

If we were statistically honest

If we were statistically honest, 90% of LinkedIn posts wouldn't exist and 99% of conferences would be empty. You can't distil and teach success. It's the factual truth, you can't.

Success in a long-tail complex system like ours is ALWAYS the almost-casual product of:

Having been in the right place at the right time.
Initial advantages that accumulate into positive feedback.

And by its own definition, this mix is not reproducible. Because it's always an arbitrage benefit in a specific window of opportunity. The window closes. The market changes. The conditions that allowed X to emerge in 2012 no longer exist in 2026.

If success were replicable, those who had it once would replicate it 100%. But the "second success" rates of once-successful entrepreneurs are systematically low. That should close the debate.

The statistical reason, even before the substantial one

There's also a purely statistical reason why success doesn't replicate and failure does. At the top there are very few spots, at the bottom many.

Think about it. Italian companies above 1 billion in revenue? Less than a hundred. Entrepreneurs who built a 100-million-plus company from zero? A few hundred. Startups passing 10 million ARR? A few dozen.

In the middle and at the bottom there literally are hundreds of thousands of small, small-to-medium, struggling companies. Millions of failed entrepreneurial attempts every decade in one country alone. The statistical sample of failure is vastly larger than the one for success, and therefore the patterns emerging from failure are more robust, stable, replicable.

Why the "I teach you success" industry survives

People don't want to understand it. And nobody cares to help them understand, because there's a rich industry based on the storytelling of "I teach you how to be successful":

Podcasts telling the life of those who "made it".
Courses promising to teach you "the millionaire's mindset".
Conferences with Italian and Dubai gurus selling the recipe.
Books by consultants who have "distilled the principles of success".
Coaches promising to make you like Musk in 12 weeks.

And we're all delusional: admitting to ourselves how things actually work removes magic from life. Removing magic is uncomfortable. Hope is also an economic engine. Many pay to buy it.

The via negativa

The via negativa — studying what DOESN'T work — is much more solid, but less sexy. It has no podcasts, no conferences, no courses. It will never sell like success stories sell. But it works.

If success is always random and irreproducible, failures aren't. Every single failure shares with the others attributes, schemes, patterns. Some are obvious, others subtle.

These are the ones I see most often in companies entering serious crisis:

Lack of commitment and obsession for months. Almost all failures go through a period — at least 12-18 months — when the entrepreneur has stopped being obsessed with the product, with customers, with the market. Delegated too much, got distracted, started living from position and not from action. When the structural problem arrives, there's no longer the mental density to see it.

Having chosen the wrong field. Not the one you don't like — the one whose specific manure you don't like eating. Every field has its typical manure: bureaucracy, disputes, difficult customers, seasonality, low margins, competition. If you've chosen a field whose typical manure repels you, you won't last. If you've chosen one where you chew it willingly — because you like it, it amuses you, you like the challenge — you can last decades.

Systematic lack of synchronisation with times and context. Almost always failure is about timing. Great ideas at the wrong time. Great products with markets not yet ready. Right business models in countries without infrastructure yet. Timing is the factor no recipe teaches, because it can't be taught. You see it, or you don't.

How to study the via negativa

Three operational practices.

1. Pre-mortem. Before starting a project, imagine you're three years ahead and the project has failed. Write down the 5-10 causes of failure. This is the most useful analysis there is, and it's free. People who know (Kahneman, Klein) have been recommending it for years. Almost no one does it.

2. Study failures, not successes. Biographies of failed companies. Case studies of projects gone bad. Post-mortems published by closed startups. Few read them because they don't give "inspiration". But they're the texts where you learn the most.

3. Talk to those who survived. Not with those who won, but with those who were close to winning and then stopped, or fell. Those conversations contain more useful information than ten interviews with unicorns, because those who fell know exactly where they fell.

A personal note

When people ask me "how did you build Deep Marketing, how did you get all those clients, how did you achieve the Treccani mention", the honest answer I give is: I don't really know. I did a lot of things. I insisted when many would have stopped. I had luck on specific encounters. I arrived at a time when the Italian supply of serious agencies was low. I worked like crazy.

If I had to redo it from scratch today, with the same energy and the same abilities, I probably wouldn't reach the same point. The context is no longer the same. The arbitrages of ten years ago no longer exist.

What instead I know how to repeat — and teach — are the things not to do. On those I have data. On those I can be useful.

But how infinitely more useful would it be to learn the characteristics of failures than, like monkeys, to spend life hanging on the lips of other monkeys, whose mental press office keeps distributing Hollywood-style narratives, without head or tail, of "how they made it".