Chapter 9 of Guns, Germs, and Steel refers to the "Anna Karenia" principle which is stated in the first line of Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Diamond goes on to elaborate that thought: " By that sentence Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.
The interesting implication from this is that success is the result of just about everything going well but failure can be the result of one one of many things going wrong; and one must be careful in looking at what went wrong in one circumstance and believing that preventing that would protect against failure for a similar circumstances.
Diamond also writes, "Fore most important things, though, success requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure."
Diamond goes on to elaborate that thought: " By that sentence Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.
The interesting implication from this is that success is the result of just about everything going well but failure can be the result of one one of many things going wrong; and one must be careful in looking at what went wrong in one circumstance and believing that preventing that would protect against failure for a similar circumstances.
Diamond also writes, "Fore most important things, though, success requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure."
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