Study the mistakes of the past, not just the heroes. The failures explain more about how things work.

Stories about people who succeeded tend to get polished until the luck and the timing are invisible, which makes them inspiring and close to useless as instruction. Failures keep their mechanics. You can see the bad assumption, the warning somebody ignored, the step taken too early. That kind of account shows how a system behaves under pressure, which is the part you can use.

Take something you are already studying and look up where it went wrong once. A collapsed bridge, a lost campaign, a company that folded. Twenty minutes on the cause will teach you more than another biography of the winner.