Lucy Kellaway misses a trick today in the Financial Times in protesting about her female acquaintances who appear to be much more successful mothers than she feels she is. She meets a “successful” fund manager with seven children and refers to a book: “How she really does it–Secrets of successful stay-at-work moms.”

In fund management it has been well recorded by academic research that luck plays a huge part and past performance is no guide to future success. Fund management rankings suffer from what is known as survivorship bias. The unlucky failures disappear flattering the cohort of survivors.

So it is with self-help books that tell us how to be successful, citing the examples of those who have succeeded, with their various methods or secrets. What we don’t know is how many people might have followed identical strategies, be they investment, or lifestyle, only to find that in different circumstances those techniques did not work.

This is particularly true in lifestyle choices. What looks smart and clever today, can very quickly turn sour. For those to whom life has never thrown a curve ball, success strategies are all very well. Long-term success may owe more to learning how to deal with failure, and also to avoid it. Avoiding hubris is probably the first lesson, and this would argue against appearing in, let alone writing a breathlessly titled self-help book.

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