“It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you, and then take advice from people that are amazing in that specific field.”

What bucket should I put this advice in?

> It's best not to take advice on direction of careers from anyone. It's better to find and work on things that interest you,

Agreed, my previous stated "ignore both and do whatever the fuck I want" approach has worked out very well for me in life, people should probably focus on identifying better what their gut tells them, rather than what randoms on the internet thinks and writes.

A lot of the advice that is relevant for top performers in a field has no relevance to an average person interested in that field.

I don't know; I think people in general are just not great at this. Successful people tend to underrate luck and overrate the brilliance of their own decisions, but the rest of us are prone to either reversing that and blaming everyone but ourselves, or being so determined to take accountability (or just depressed) that we become overly self-critical, or simply not understanding why things happened the way they did and reaching for any explanation that resolves the chaos into something narratively satisfying.

Intuitively, that'd make sense if that unsuccessful person eventually found success, otherwise who knows if they actually picked up what made them unsuccessful in the first place?

Yep, many successful people greatly underappreciate the effect of simple dumb luck in their lives. And often they just make up complex reasoning chains, even wholly believing them, that more of it was in their control/talent, etc.

Nonetheless, there are many successful people I would gladly listen to for advice, though they are often successful in a different meaning than what venture capitalists would use (e.g. parents with great kids, managing to keep a healthy work-life balance, happiness, and maybe even having time to spend on some cool hobby project -- you are heros!)

If there's a single unifying fault to the unsuccessful people I know (for any definition of unsuccesful, including my own failures) is that they're precisely bad at working out why they failed - if they even think to ask the question. The successful people are generally much clearer that it was studying hard or networking or natural talent that contributed to their success. The latter group may have people who don't realise luck played a part, but they massively increased their chances of good luck by the aforementioned behaviours.

Luck is a huge factor in success, so that logic leads nowhere. If one of the quacks selling how-to-succeed recipes had got it right, everyone would do it by now.

very good read. I get into the same discussion sometimes with people. If you're successful you're automatically labelled as "lucky".

There are successful people that failed many times before being successful. Somehow these days, previous failures and persistence seems to be ignored and they focus just on the luck you got on the 20th try.

> unsuccessful people can tell you teach you plenty of "don't do this mistake",

But how can I know for sure that that particular mistake is actually why they were unsuccessful? Has exactly the same issue as listening only to successful people as they hardly know what actually made them successful most of the time, but they still compose large blog posts with their reasoning for why.

Again, I still think my approach of reading both but then regardless go my own way is the preferable approach, at least for me, ymmv.

Veritasium has a good piece for this kind of bias:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

An advantage that is not "advisable", like being born in january, in a rich country, in an above average family, or just having luck, might have more influence on the outcome than any conscious action. It is almost sure that one-in-a-million level people only edge over the other 999,999 they competed with is just "have more luck".