CODE IN TOKYO

The Right Distance From "Laws of Success" — Why Do People Keep Falling for Self-Help?

“If you wish strongly enough, it will come true” — it’s not that simple

The world is flooded with so-called “laws of success.”

I don’t intend to deny these completely.

Honestly, when things aren’t going well, there’s a part of me that wants to cling to them.

But at the end of the day, we live in the physical world.

No matter how positive you are, you get sick sometimes. You get into accidents. You’re affected by the economy. Sometimes you work hard and the timing just doesn’t align.

Life isn’t sweet enough to be fully controlled by thought alone.

Yet they aren’t “meaningless”

That said, I don’t think all laws of success are bogus either.

For example, in terms of:

they do have a certain effect.

Humans are not perfectly rational machines. Simply believing “maybe I can do this” can genuinely change how much you actually act.

So as a kind of “talisman,” they’re not that bad.

The problem starts the moment you treat them as universal truth.

The danger of the success-law business

The success-law business is strong for a structural reason.

You tell 100 people, “You can succeed with this method.” Of those, maybe 10 will actually succeed — partly by luck, talent, and timing.

Those 10 become living proof: “It’s thanks to this method!”

Then those success stories become billboards to gather the next 100 people.

What happens to the 90 who failed?

They quietly disappear.

“You lacked drive.” “You didn’t believe enough.” “You didn’t try hard enough.”

They get processed that way, and effectively cease to exist.

This is textbook survivorship bias.

A world where “only the successful are visible”

There’s a famous story about returning warplanes.

When engineers tried to reinforce the parts with the most bullet holes, a statistician said:

“No. Those are the planes that came back even with holes there. The truly dangerous spots are where a hole means the plane never returned.”

Success laws work the same way.

What we see is only the side that “made it back.”

The people on YouTube saying “I succeeded with this method!” — they are the ones who returned.

So how should we engage with them?

Personally, I think success laws are best treated as:

“training wheels for the mind,” not “a religion that ignores reality”

Believe in the future. Think positively. Take action.

None of that is bad in itself.

But at the same time, you cannot escape the “physical laws” that simply exist:

No matter how hard you visualize, you can’t travel to Mars. (Maybe Elon Musk can?)

The moment you ignore those and declare “wishing makes it so,” things get dangerous.

Finally

The world is full of people who genuinely worked hard and were not rewarded.

But those people don’t write books. They don’t run seminars. They don’t appear in YouTube ads.

So our field of vision is filled with “the successful.”

But behind them, countless untold failures are quietly stacked.

Don’t forget that reality — and still, live a little positively anyway.

That, I think, is the healthiest distance to keep.