The person who wins the gamble becomes a terrible advertisement for gambling.

Survivors are the loudest witnesses, and they are the least representative. The person who bet everything and won gets the stage, the interview, the book, while the far larger group who made the same bet and lost simply vanishes from the conversation. What you hear is not the outcome of the strategy, it is the outcome of the winner.

When a story makes a risk look tempting, ask who is not in the room. How many others tried this and what happened to them. That missing crowd is the real information.