There's one guaranteed way to fail. Learn only from your own experience.

I mention it as a confession, not a warning. I've done exactly this more than once, and usually didn't notice until it was too late.

Charlie Munger built a mental model around trying to avoid it, inverting the usual question. Instead of asking what produces success, ask what guarantees failure — then avoid that. Near the top of his list: rely only on your own experience, never anyone else's. Without a wider base of learning than that, he said, "you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest."

The obvious response is to read biographies, study history, borrow other people's hard-won experience instead of only your own. Bismarck is widely credited with the line — "fools learn from experience, I prefer to learn from the experience of others" — though the exact source is murky enough to treat as folk wisdom. Elon Musk is the modern case people reach for: no formal mentors in aerospace, no industry network — he taught himself enough to found SpaceX largely by reading. Asked how, his answer was three words: "I read books."

The catch

Studying only winners has a trap built in.

Survivor bias. Remember the graveyard exists too.

A pattern I think I've been missing

Here's what I've come around to, slowly: first-principles thinking might actually be the real lesson from history — I just wasn't reading for the right pattern for a long time.

Nobody who reshaped an industry did it by copying the industry. Carnegie didn't build Carnegie Steel by running mills the way everyone else did — he obsessed over cost accounting and pushed the Bessemer process further than competitors thought made sense, while rivals stuck to the old way of estimating costs. Musk didn't design cheaper batteries by asking what manufacturers had always charged — he priced the raw materials (cobalt, nickel, aluminium, a steel can) at spot rates and found the real cost was $80/kWh, not the "historical" $600. The gap wasn't physics. It was nobody bothering to question convention.

So maybe the pattern that repeats isn't "do what worked before." It's "the ones who won stopped copying and rebuilt from fundamentals." That's not a contradiction of learning from others' experience. It might be the actual content of it.

Where I've landed, for now

Invert first: know what guarantees failure, and rule it out. Study history second — winners and losers both, or the survivorship trap gets you. And read for the real pattern, not the surface one: the leaders worth learning from are almost always the ones who stopped reasoning by analogy and rebuilt from first principles when it mattered.

Ten books worth learning from

1. ​Poor Charlie's Almanack — Charlie Munger​
2. ​The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie — Andrew Carnegie​
3. ​Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. — Ron Chernow​
4. ​Elon Musk — Walter Isaacson​
5. ​Shoe Dog — Phil Knight​
6. ​The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life — Alice Schroeder​
7. ​Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson​
8. ​Benjamin Franklin: An American Life — Walter Isaacson​
9. ​A Man for All Markets — Edward O. Thorp​
10. ​Leading by Design: The IKEA Story — Ingvar Kamprad​

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/Jonas

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