There is a worthwhile premise behind the title of this article. Success stories are generally fluff designed to rewrite history and control a desired narrative.
Most the real reasons for success are taboo, boring and too technical to talk about, e.g. "we got massive SEO traffic through user-generated content and 10x'd traffic in 2 months"..
One of his examples of the importance of not focusing on success is actually a success story; he just conflates the path to success with the content along that path. That might sound confusing, so consider two ants that go to find food. One ant does it by crossing over an area where a plane did not crash. The other finds food by going over an area where a plane did crash. They both report back the success story - a pheromone trail that describes their respective path to success. The content along that path and the path itself are separate things. Just because the content on the path to success involved reasoning with regard to a plane which just so happened to be crashed doesn't mean that communicating expected value of paths in general is refuted. Otherwise the point is self-refuting, since it argues on the basis of a path description which has positive expected value that path descriptions of expected value are inherently flawed.
Or, "I'm fully self-made. All I had was an introduction to the CEO of Sequoia by my father who happens to be a Senator and a small zero-interest loan, barely a million dollars."
I encountered a founder once who built his small empire from just an idea in a garage. How did the employees know it started as an idea in a garage? Because he started every speech at every company meeting by telling the story. But if you dug just a little deeper, you'd learn that this was like the fourth or fifth startup he tried. Every time one failed, he'd go back home, live off his family's wealth for a little while dreaming up the next attempt.
Yea, I could also be a pro baseball player if I got an infinite number of at-bats.
Most the real reasons for success are taboo, boring and too technical to talk about, e.g. "we got massive SEO traffic through user-generated content and 10x'd traffic in 2 months"..