Following an explicit, testable method systematically improves the chances of success compared with acting on a popular myth of success: the story that talent, hard work, and the right product will carry you to the goal on their own.
The claim has to remain comparative rather than absolute:
- The load-bearing structure is “method versus myth,” not method by itself.
- Following a method does not automatically improve the odds. Exact adherence to a bad method makes them worse: cargo cults and flawless execution of the wrong plan are still failures.
- An explicit, testable method does provide one decisive advantage: feedback can be used to improve the method itself.
- The comparison class that makes the claim falsifiable is action guided by the field’s popular narrative of success.
There is also a condition of applicability. The environment must have a knowable structure and accessible feedback, the Kahneman-Klein condition for valid expertise, or the method must create that feedback itself. Ries’s Build-Measure-Learn loop does the latter: it turns a chaotic startup environment into one that can gradually be known.
Examples:
- Startup success can be engineered: the right process can be learned is Ries’s version: the myth of the “right product” set against an engineered process.
- The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition begins with a novice following rules without qualification; intuition becomes legitimate only at later stages of mastery.
- The School of Systems Management makes the same claim in its introductory lesson on self-development practices: its best students trust the instructor and follow the form precisely; champions are made through disciplined adherence to form.
The warning is that this claim is vulnerable to the same selection bias used against the success myth. There can be a myth of method. The defensible form is narrower: a method can improve the probability of success and the speed of learning, but it cannot guarantee the result.