I'm very sympathetic to the idea that many of the most dramatic events and people in our history are black swans; that is, possible outcomes that were wildly improbable until they actually happened. The problem is that we don't do a very good job of understanding probabilities before something happens, and we assign inevitability to anything that actually happened in the past.
My personal conclusion is that most of the lessons we try to learn from history are in fact not capable of teaching us anything. Unique circumstances are not reproducible, great events are not repeatable. They are in fact black swans; wildly implausible events that burst onto the scene and never to be seen again. And when you think about it, you can sum up the whole of human history as a long series of Alice-in-Wonderland absurdities. The rise and fall of Empires, great kings, fallen heroes, battles lost and won, great inventions, failed societies, disasters, disease. From the death of the dinosaurs right up to 9/11 its been one curve ball after another from the universe we think to be stable and predictable.
Can you become a success in business by emulating Bill Gates? Maybe, but I doubt it. You're just as likely to do so as mimicking the number picking strategy of the latest lottery winner. I doubt that Bill Gates could reproduce his own success if he was starting out today rather than when he did.
There's a good article here, and I'm interested in reading the book. It's the sort of really interesting idea that gets your mind racing. I'm sure the author has many more interesting ideas than what's come to me so far.
