Comment by InsideOutSanta
15 hours ago
> 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.
15 hours ago
> 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.
How do you know that's limiting your success?
Do you think the most successful people got that way by attending events? I thought they were hacking in their garages, building great products.
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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.