Published on: July 8, 2025 at 3:58 pm
There’s a dirty little secret about what separates successful entrepreneurs from those who fail: Many of the winners have luck on their side, and many of the failures work just as hard but don’t succeed through no fault of their own, according to Academy of Management Scholar Dean Shepherd of the University of Notre Dame.
Shepherd said that stories of entrepreneurs who have failed quite a bit are common. There’s often a disconnect between how investors and other entrepreneurs view them and how they are portrayed in the media.
“You sometimes see it in Silicon Valley, where they say, ‘I’ll only invest in in entrepreneurs who have failed before, because it means that they’ve learned and they know to make tough decisions,’ whereas you see press reports in other parts of the world, or even other parts of America, where they really penalize an entrepreneur who’s failed, despite the fact that they tried their best,” Shepherd said.
“They lost their own wealth, but the media ridicule people who have failed,” he said. “I see that in the press sometimes, where they attribute success to the person’s skills and experience, but then when someone fails, they say that there’s something fundamentally wrong with that person, and the press has an anti-failure bias, which doesn’t help.”
Luck be a lady
Unsuccessful entrepreneurs may have had to deal with a challenging external environment or competitive landscape or face any number of variables beyond their control—regardless of their skills, experience, and effort.
“They could have done everything right and then had bad luck, and the other person could have done everything wrong, and just by luck, they ended up being in the right place at the right time, and they were successful,” Shepherd said. “In either case, you don’t actually learn much from those instances, because luck played such a large role, but then they’ll attribute the person who was successful to their decisions and actions, even though it wasn’t the case, and they’ll attribute failure to the person’s decisions and actions, but it wasn’t the case.
“And so it’s really like a form of superstitious learning,” he said. “We’re learning something, but actually not gaining any knowledge from it. We’re learning something that’s wrong.”
