Success stories are useful because they expose decisions, routines and constraints. They become misleading when the reader treats the observed winner as a controlled experiment.
Contradiction
Persistence can matter and survivorship bias can still distort the lesson. Both can be true.
Research on serial entrepreneurship finds evidence that prior success can predict later success, while other work shows that initial success can itself create persistent advantage. The point is not to replace skill with luck. It is to avoid pretending the two are separable from a single biography.
Sources
Next question
Which behaviours remain predictive after controlling for access, market timing and the fact that failed comparison cases are less visible?