When Malcolm Gladwell released his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, in 2008, it debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for eleven straight weeks.

Across two chapters, Gladwell shared the story of Christopher Langan, who has been described as “the smartest man in America.”

Langan, with a seemingly impossible IQ score of 195, breezed through even the toughest intelligence tests as if they were a CAPTCHA form asking him to “select all squares with a bicycle.”

Yet Gladwell pointed to Langan as someone who, despite his brilliance, failed to make any great contributions to his field.

This case study posed an interesting question:

Why do smart and talented people fail to achieve success?

And if genius and talent is insufficient or potentially even unnecessary then what does predict success?

Gladwell offered a number of arguments back in 2008 including the importance of social skills.

But this week I read a 2019 study published in the top scientific journal, Nature, that offered a new explanation for why some win and others lose.

The results were so fascinating that we dropped everything we had planned for this edition to share the full findings with you.

Here’s how to win, according to science…

P.S., thank you to everyone last week who picked up a free copy of “The Vibe Coder’s Playbook.” It shows off 10 apps that people built over the past few months to save thousands of dollars, automate their workflows, and launch their ideas faster—just by prompting AI (without writing a single line of code). If you haven’t already, you can get the playbook for free by just taking 2 minutes to fill out our short research survey.

To uncover the secrets of success, the researchers gathered data from three wildly different arenas where high-stakes victories and failures are common:

1. Science: They analyzed 776,721 grant applications submitted to the National Institutes of Health to see which scientists eventually secured funding.

2. Business: They tracked 58,111 startups from a massive venture capital database to see which founders achieved a successful "exit" through an IPO or major acquisition.

3. Security: In an unconventional move, they even analyzed the Global Terrorism Database to track the attack histories of terrorist groups, morbidly defining "success" in terms of casualty numbers and whether an attack achieved its deadly objective.

The logic was simple: if the same hidden pattern of success appeared across all three disparate worlds, it would likely be a fundamental truth about how we succeed.

It did, and the findings were remarkable.

Note: for the sake of clarity, I will refer to the group of people who succeeded as “winners” and the group who did not as “nonwinners.” These labels apply only to the domain in which the person was studied—there’s no doubt many “nonwinners” succeeded in other areas of their personal and professional lives and vice versa. 

The role of luck

If success were simply a matter of luck, it would be like rolling a dice and trying to guess the number it lands on.

The more you try, the more likely you are to eventually guess the correct number.

For this reason, according to the study’s probabilistic math, long streaks of failed attempts should be quite rare in a world where winners are chosen at random. 

Imagine waiting at a door that only opens on a correct dice roll—odds are, you won't be waiting long if you just keep rolling.

But that's not what the researchers found.

When they compared the expected "luck" timeline to the real-world data, they discovered that both winners and nonwinners endured far more failures than chance could explain.

This finding was corroborated by a Nature Scientific Data study published in April of this year.

It analyzed data from a time tracking app where users logged progress on millions of tasks across over 50,000 projects.

The results confirmed that “real failure streaks tend to be significantly longer than what is expected under the chance hypothesis.”

Success, it seems, is a much longer and harder game than a simple roll of the dice.

The role of persistence

So if it's not luck, is it just raw grit? 

Are winners simply those who take more shots on goal?

The data delivered another surprise.

Winners and nonwinners, on average, made the same number of attempts before their journey ended—either in success or in quitting. 

So, if it wasn't the quantity of attempts that mattered, maybe it was innate talent? 

Perhaps winners just start with a natural advantage?

The role of talent

To test this, the researchers assessed the quality of the very first attempt made by each person.

For example, every NIH grant proposal receives a percentile score from reviewers, even if it's ultimately rejected.

But again, to their surprise, they found no difference. 

Eventual winners and nonwinners began their journeys with equally (often shoddy) first attempts.

So if it’s not luck, not persistence, and not talent—what is it?

The telltale signs of a winner

The first real clue emerged when the researchers compared the first attempt to the second-to-last attempt (for winners, this was the attempt prior to their breakthrough and for nonwinners, it was the one prior to them throwing in the towel). 

For winners, the quality of their attempt had improved dramatically. 

The business a founder launched just before their "big win," for example, was far more polished than the first one they ever started.

For the nonwinners, there was no such improvement. 

Their performance had stagnated for some reason.

Something was happening along the journey that separated these two groups.

It was the next clue that revealed what it was. 

An interesting pattern emerged in the timing between attempts: for winners, the time interval kept shrinking over time. 

The time they spent on each failed attempt was getting shorter and shorter, an effect so powerful it was obvious even between their first and second try.

This increasing pace is one of the most reliable early signals of who is on the right track to victory. 

If you’re in the business of picking winners, such as hiring or investment, time-between-attempts may be one of the most useful indicators you can rely on.

The most critical and final question is, why were winners able to accelerate?

The engine of success

The ultimate answer put forward by the researchers is that winners are better at learning from their mistakes.

Instead of throwing each failed attempt away, they treat their attempts like a bundle of different parts.

They identify what worked—the winning components—and carry them forward into their next attempt.

They hold onto the good stuff and focus their energy on refining their weaknesses.

This means each attempt builds upon the last, allowing them to compound their quality over time. 

It still takes winners a huge number of attempts to succeed—because going from "great" to "excellent" is much harder than going from "bad" to "average"—but their cycles of iteration are more productive.

Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) is a textbook case study of obsessive, focused, "improve one thing at a time" iteration. “All you need to do,” Donaldson advises aspiring YouTubers, is “make 100 videos… and improve one thing every time.”

Nonwinners, meanwhile, exhibited a pattern of “flailing.” 

They jumped from one thing to the next without reusing what worked. 

They were always starting from scratch, never benefiting from accumulated quality. This meant it took them longer to move from one attempt to the next.

In essence, nonwinners were always writing a first draft. Winners were writing a second, then a third, then a fourth. Each draft is faster to turn in than the last because it builds on what’s already working from the one prior—this is the core explanation for why winners were accelerating.

Another new study from May of this year reinforces the consequences of throwing away existing quality.

Titled “The pivot penalty in research” and also published in Nature, the study analyzed millions of scientific papers and patents and found that “the impact of new research steeply declines the further a researcher moves from their previous work.”

The further you drift from the quality you’ve already accumulated, the higher the penalty you pay.

We’ve touched on this principle in previous editions.

Stewart Butterfield, for example, made a successful pivot from his failing game company, Glitch.

Butterfield didn’t transition from building an online game to something disconnected like opening a robotic-powered bakery. He took something that was already working inside the company, their internal messaging app, and turned it into the multi-billion dollar success story that is Slack.

Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, specifically advises founders who are considering a pivot to reflect on the components of their journey that showed signs of success and to steer towards them.

Build on quality, don’t throw it away.

This isn’t to say that starting from scratch is always the wrong move.

Fashion empress, Vera Wang, for instance, had to build a brand new career for herself after she failed to make the Olympic figure skating team as a teenager—a goal she’d spent her whole life working toward.

Wang began climbing a brand new ladder in the fashion world for two decades before launching her own company at 40 years old—the one that would go on to generate billions of dollars.

Wang clearly paid a “penalty” when she changed her career. It was the right move to make in the long run but she had to restart the compounding process. At some point you have to compound quality in a consistent direction or you’ll never win.

The study didn’t go as far as explaining why some people flail while others iterate. 

It could be due to economic constraints. Sometimes focus is a luxury. Maybe a scientist has long gaps between submissions because they need to do other work to pay the bills.

Or perhaps it’s psychological—a reluctance to face one's imperfections, or falling prey to "shiny object syndrome," always searching for the next big thing instead of quietly refining what's in front of you.

Whatever the reason, the core insight remains:

Winners are incremental accumulators of quality.

They methodically build from strength to strength, until they eventually produce hit after hit.

When you begin a new attempt, break down your previous one into what worked and what didn’t. Take the time to consider what high-quality components you can carry forward into your next round and reflect upon those that need to be improved.

It may well be the difference between victory and defeat.

New project who dis

Shoutout to Louise who recently kicked off a new project with a fresh Dot Grid book.

While the right constraints can be a gift, tackling your creative goals without a steady supply of Action Method tools is like trying to run a marathon in flip-flops, a limitation with only downside!

Show your ideas some respect and replenish your stash today.

Bonus: Progression vs Stagnation

As a bonus piece of content, I asked AI (Gemini 2.5 Pro) to help me bring the study at the heart of today’s edition to life with a hypothetical case study. It did a great job at making the difference between progressing and flailing more tangible…

Imagine Founder A and Founder B both launch their first startup. 

It's a social media app for pet owners. They work hard, but after a year, they run out of money and their companies both fail. At this point, Founder A and Founder B are indistinguishable.

But then they both start new businesses.

This is where their paths split, revealing their underlying learning strategies.

Founder B (The "Stagnation" Arc)

1. The Idea: Founder B is disheartened. They conclude, "The whole pet social media idea is terrible. I need something completely different." They decide to build a high-end, artisanal coffee subscription box.

2. The Process: Founder B starts completely from scratch. Their previous experience building an app, managing a user community, and marketing to pet owners feels irrelevant to the world of coffee sourcing and logistics. They are essentially a first-time founder all over again. They have "reset" their progress.

3. The Second Failure: This venture also fails. The quality of this second attempt (in terms of execution, market fit, etc.) is no better than the first. The time between the first failure and this second one was long, maybe two years, as they had to learn a whole new industry.

4. The Third Venture: Frustrated, Founder B says, "Okay, tangible products are too hard. I'll go back to software." They decide to create a B2B software tool for inventory management. Again, they start from scratch. They are "flailing," jumping between disconnected ideas.

5. The End: After this third failure, Founder B concludes they aren't "cut out for this" and takes a corporate job. Their journey shows no pattern of improvement, just a series of disconnected, full-effort attempts.

Founder A (The "Progression" Arc):

1. The Idea: Founder A also sees their first venture fail. But instead of throwing everything away, they perform a post-mortem. They realize the idea was okay, but their execution had flaws. The biggest weakness was user retention (Component X). However, their user acquisition strategy (Component Y) was actually brilliant and cheap.

2. The Process: For their second venture, they decide to "reuse" what worked and "re-do" what didn't. They launch a new company: a niche social app, but this time for local hiking groups.

• They reuse their best component: They apply the exact same brilliant user acquisition strategy (Component Y) from their first company. This is fast and effective.

• They fix the weak component: They focus all their energy on building better features for user retention (Component X).

3. The Second "Failure": This second company does better, attracts a small seed round (higher quality!), but ultimately fails to get a big follow-on investment. It's a failure, but a higher quality failure. Crucially, because they reused so much, they were able to launch this second venture just 8 months after the first one failed. Their speed has increased.

4. The Third Venture (The "Hot Streak"): They are now on a roll. They've learned even more. They launch their third company just 6 months later. It's another social app, but with a new business model they learned from venture #2. They reuse the great acquisition strategy from #1 and the solid retention features from #2. This time, everything clicks.

5. The End: The third venture takes off and is acquired for a large sum. Founder A succeeded. Their journey was a series of connected attempts, each one building on the last, with accelerating speed and improving quality. The long "failure streak" of their first two ventures was actually a necessary, productive period of learning and refinement.

A quote for the road

“Momentum is a more sustainable advantage than most realize.”

—Scott Belsky

Thanks for subscribing, and sharing anything you’ve learned with your teams and networks (let us know what you think and share ideas: @ActionDigest).