Do this before you follow a successful person’s advice

The useful part

Their paths to conventional success involve overcoming challenges and persevering through hardships, reading like a modern-day hero's journey. These epic stories are naturally intriguing to the masses, which explains the crowded market of books, news articles, and social media content about their successes. We hope that by learning their stories, we may find some untold insight into achieving success ourselves.

How it works

• The problem with successful people's sharing their stories, and with them, advice on how to do the same, is that they may not be the most reliable narrators.
• What bothers me about the "quit and start your own company" advice is how reductive it is.
• Lately, my LinkedIn feed has been full of founders telling people to quit their jobs, school, or both, and bet on themselves with their own business.
• It reduces entrepreneurship to a choice, one that tests a person's courage and conviction in themselves.
• Essentially, it is the same American Dream I thought we had debunked, repackaged in Silicon Valley wrapping paper.

What to take from it

For every person who tries their hand at starting a company, there are many more who would like to but can't. More specifically, it lacks context about privilege, that pesky little thing we have but refuse to acknowledge.

Details worth keeping

Successful people love to share their stories—as they should. For every founder who succeeds, many more fail, as many as nine in 10. That's the issue with the advice being doled out right now: