I think the counter-point to this (Which you kind of bring up, "what to watch out for") is that success is often more about not losing than winning. So reading about other people's failures can be very helpful in ensuring you don't lose.

The other thing is that although a failure may be unique overall, there are undoubtedly common aspects among failures. So I feel like you can sift through a lot of failures relatively quickly once you find some of the common patterns.

For example, one of the most common failures of startups is no market for the product. Therefore, if you're researching a failed company and it seems like this is the case you can assume there will be little value in this failure and skip ahead.

Another possible technique following this line of thinking is to apply filters. If they failed before they reached x point, you can skip ahead.

> Was Nikola Tesla a failure?

He was a brilliant innovator that added value to the world. He was a failed entrepreneur that did not recapture part of the value he created. That makes him a huge success in my books but I wish he was more comfortable and content in his final years.

Biographies of failures are not the same as negative results in science. A negative result has value and it may not be as sexy as a positive result but should be published if not for anything more than to prevent other people from going down the same path or to add more data in meta studies. Also, negative or positive depends on how the original hypothesis is framed. One person could claim that X has no effect on Y as the null hypothesis, and another could claim that X has an effect on Y, and the same results would give a positive result for one, and negative for another.

I don't think negative vs. positive is a useful bifurcation here, both for biographies and scientific results. I'd rather we do interesting/surprising vs boring/expected. In other words, can we learn something from this? There are biographies of "failures" that are full of wisdom and reflection, as well as biographies of "successes" that have stumbled upon the success without so much as a second thought, and vice versa. Same for scientific results.

> it's not very efficient to learn how to do something by enumerating all the ways you cannot do it

I think the better way to look at it would be to look at ways that it could've been done better. Everyone's a genius and mastermind that knows exactly why a certain product fails ("if they only had know this") or that the "bubble was there all along". Learning what could've been done better is much better than success stories where people knew what to do from some divine inspiration.

Yes, it's right. Still, in some form, these should be valuable because they would help understanding what actually made a difference for the ones who did succeed. Because most of the time we just ask them (or they tell us without asking) how they did it. But they may have no idea whether what they think was the key actually was the key.

In short: it could help with removing (some of) the survivorship bias.

This sounds adjacent to the Anna Karenina principle: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."