Anna Karenina Principle
Principle that states that successful outcomes require all relevant factors to be present and that a failure can be caused by the absence of any one of these factors.
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Origin
The principle takes its name from the opening line of Leo Tolstoy's 1877 novel Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The idea that success demands every element to align while failure needs only one flaw was popularized as a working principle by biologist Jared Diamond in his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond used it to explain why only 14 of the world's 148 large wild land mammals have ever been successfully domesticated — each failure stemmed from a different missing factor.
Updated February 22, 2026