Study Failure, not Greatness.

Success is idiosyncratic. Investing especially so.

Finding good investments - good management teams, good entrepreneurs - is finding good fit for style.

Outstanding investors in the early phases generally display one or more of the following styles: first - a knack of getting to the absolute essence of an entrepreneur's character. Those most gifted will get to the nub alarming quickly - as if having spent 300 hours doing a psychological profile, not unlike a police TV drama where they profile the serial killer in thirty seconds.

Another style is the investor who appears to largely ignore the person as founder and focus attention principally on the structural economics of the business idea: the market power, the ability to capture value, the unit economics, the potential for disruption.

Both of those styles work beautifully.

The third: an investor that thinks little about the underlying company or the founder. Rather, they watch what other investors do. Like a pack hunter, they don't try to hunt and kill prey directly. They wait, swoop in, and win deals they saw other good investors have gone for.

In life, business and investing, people spend a lot of time studying greatness. They seldom study failure.

There are many books written about Mohammed Ali, Steve Jobs and Tiger Woods. Less so about the heavyweight boxers that hit some immutable wall; the start-ups that just failed to raise capital; the golfers that lost their edge or their nerve.

The great companies, the great investments, are a composite of all the things that have worked. By studying failure, investors invert the road to success - they then ask: what are the possible causes of business mortality, of life-altering injury - what will absolutely alter the critical path to failure.

For instance: bad capitalisation is the original sin for early-stage businesses: many start-ups, three to five years in, are still haunted by poor capital decisions at the beginning - an investor they do not want; a valuation that was hopelessly dilutive and repels future capital, a misalignment of interests.

Don’t only study greatness; study failure. Then work out how not to be that. It's not that good soldiers become veterans. It's that lucky soldiers become veterans, and veterans are good soldiers.

Just the luck of surviving combat - for example - the first few times puts you up an experience curve dramatically. Just as surviving those first 36 months of leadership and management as a business founder makes a significant difference to those individuals and their likelihood of success.

Half of success is just staying alive untill you get good.

If you survive long enough, compound long enough, maybe greatness just eventually becomes you.