Rare success attracts attention; common failure rarely gets interviewed.

The record you can see is heavily filtered. Success is interesting, so it gets told, studied, and copied, while the far more common failure leaves almost no trace and no one asks it what went wrong. What looks like a body of evidence about what works is often just a collection of the outcomes that happened to survive.

When you study someone who made it, go looking for the people who did nearly the same thing and did not. Their absence is data, and it is usually the most useful data available.