alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
>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.
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:
> 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.
>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.
Just play the lottery once, pick the correct numbers and win $100mil.
If you can't do that - not sure anyone can help you.