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“Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”
Galeazzo Ciano
I looked up dozens of people who got rich before 50 and what they did each day. When I went looking for people with the same habits who never got rich, I could barely find any.
Rockefeller and Buffett got biographies and interviews.
The people who didn’t make it rarely get either.
The same thing happens in medicine.
A British doctor named Ben Goldacre had a patient with depression.
He wanted to get the prescription right, so he read every study he could find on a newer drug called reboxetine.
They all said it worked. He wrote the prescription.
Years later, researchers in Germany got the drugmaker to hand over every study it ran.
Most of them never made it into a journal. In those, reboxetine did no better than a sugar pill.
Goldacre read everything he could find.
The people who didn’t make it rarely get written about, so the next person copies a winner’s habit without seeing who else kept it.
Before you copy a winner’s habit, go looking for the people who kept it and didn’t make it.
A biography tells you what a winner did. The people who didn’t make it tell you whether it mattered.
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What advice should you verify before following it?
