Comment by embedding-shape
16 hours ago
> I would encourage people not to seek advice from successful people like this (survivorship bias).
Personally I don't see the problem, as long as you're aware there is survivorship bias involved here.
What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :)
Personally I do both, read about what worked for people, also read about what didn't work for people, then ignore both and do whatever the fuck I want.
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. In mid 2000s in Australia all the "top people" were telling me not to get into a software engineering career because it was dead. It's certainly challenged right now, but it took off during those 15+ years.
“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?
Understandable irony. The way I see it, there are no buckets, only context surrounding the advice and your awareness thereof. If the context is unknown, best to take it with a big chunk of salt... Or spend time familiarizing yourself with the context if you think it's worth the time/effort; working on things that interest you is a nice way of doing that.
But some advice is less specific than other advice though. Some things are always stupid, and some things are always smart, if you look at the context of our world and society. I find myself pursuing these "fundamental truths" with great interest lately, especially now that the world is changing so quickly.
> 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.
>What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people?
Seek advice from the averagely successful people, since that is statistically what you're most likely to be.
> seek advice from unsuccessful people
Intuitively, I would guess that they have a better grasp of what made them fail than successful people have of what made them succeed.
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?
I think it's reasonably common for people to understand what makes them unsuccessful but be unable or unwilling to resolve the problem.
For me, I know that one major reason for putting an upper limit on my success is my inability to form effective professional relationships. I know I should go to events and talk to people and use these relationships to my advantage, but that's just not something I've ever been good at, and I find it so incredibly unpleasant that I also just don't want to do it.
2 replies →
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!)
same do unsuccesful ones. They usually overappreciate luck of succesful people from what I see, as a way of coping, many say "that guy was just lucky, i was unlucky". If you dig deeper, that person wasn't just "unlucky", they lacked the persistence, work ethics and other qualities compared to other succesful ones.
Of course, there are degrees and exceptions on every side, but the coping mechanism is very strong among people.
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.
Just play the lottery once, pick the correct numbers and win $100mil.
If you can't do that - not sure anyone can help you.
Kids don’t even know what it is, even less actually feel what it is. At 17 you think that it won’t hit you, that you will be the one to survive until you don’t.
> What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people?
Do both. Get advice from successful and unsuccessful people and take the diff
> What's the alternative really, seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :)
Learning from their mistakes (where it did go wrong) can be as valuable as.
I would seek advice from people who have a theory of why or why not they were successful. A lot of those results were happening in very specific contexts and usually should not be regarded as a blueprint, but as inspiration to whatever I do.
The unsuccessful person is much more likely to be actually connected to the daily needs and struggles of a normal person. Paul Graham hasn't seen the inside of a grocery store in the past twenty years.
I know who the 17 years old is closest to.
The better alternative is to always ignore unsolicited advice.
> Personally I do both
That’s what you get from listening to “successful people”. You get to learn about all the things they tried that failed, then the things that did work on that 24th try, which was successful.
The “survivorship bias” people always seem to assume that the “survivor” lucked into his fortune on his first try ever, so he can’t have learned anything, so we don’t have to listen to him. But that’s seldom the case.
I’ve written about this before:
https://expatsoftware.com/Articles/survivorship-bias.html
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.
> seek advice from unsuccessful people? That seems worse :)
Not sure why would you think so.
Inverse reasoning is very powerful, and unsuccessful people can give you plenty of "don't do this mistake", which the survivors would not even think about.
> 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.
>Personally I don't see the problem, as long as you're aware there is survivorship bias involved here.
Pretty tall ask, especially if this is targeted at 17 year olds...
Seek advice from people who have had a normal level of success. Not a one-in-a-million level.
I would say you should seek advice from someone has lucky and successful as Paul Graham but I wouldn’t take his public Twitter as advice it’s entertainment period.
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".
It's not the only edge. Wildly successful people are usually lucky and talented/hard working.
1 reply →