> Very true. It's a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would read the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed businesses, products, movements, governments, etc.

Survivorship bias actually works both ways: by studying only the failures you are quite likely to misunderstand what made them fail and you might zero in on characteristics that are actually shared by many successful businesses.