**Maybe failed people have more to teach us than successful people**  
I have started thinking that we may be listening to the wrong stories.  
Almost every podcast or interview is about someone who made it.  
How they became rich.  
How they found the opportunity.  
How they stayed disciplined.  
How they took risks.  
How they built the right mindset.  
But once someone becomes successful, their story naturally gets cleaned up.  
Everything starts sounding intentional.  
They connected the right dots.  
They made the right decisions.  
They trusted the right people.  
They kept going and eventually won.  
But what about everything that happened in between?  
The people who betrayed them.  
The wrong partners they trusted.  
The deals that nearly destroyed them.  
The people who disappeared when things got difficult.  
The mistakes they are embarrassed to talk about.  
The lucky breaks that saved them at the right moment.  
Those parts often disappear from the final success story.  
And that is why I sometimes think a failed person may have much more to tell you.  
Ask someone whose business collapsed and they may tell you exactly where things started going wrong.  
They can tell you which warning signs they ignored.  
Who they trusted when they should not have.  
How a partner betrayed them.  
How cash flow destroyed an otherwise good business.  
How a deal that looked perfect turned into a disaster.  
How being too trusting, too confident, too fast, or too dependent on one person cost them everything.  
And perhaps most importantly, they can tell you what they would watch for if they ever started again.  
There is also something uncomfortable that success stories rarely talk enough about: luck.  
Two equally intelligent and hardworking people can make similar decisions.  
One gets the right timing, the right customer, the right connection, or simply survives long enough for things to work.  
The other doesn’t.  
Then years later, we interview the winner and turn everything they did into a formula for success.  
Maybe we should spend more time studying the people who lost.  
Not to become pessimistic.  
To understand the traps.  
Success teaches you what worked once.  
Failure can teach you what can kill you.  
And sometimes the person who lost everything can tell you far more about the game than the person standing on the stage holding the trophy.

We interview winners to learn how to succeed. Maybe we should interview losers to learn what can destroy us.