Why Most Success Advice is Bulls*t

Nowadays, the web is awash with proverbial sages on the stage — people selling you their so-called playbook to riches.

Whether it’s a digital vagabond, a tech entrepreneur, or a property magnate, they’ll each try to sell you on something that sounds like a recipe out of a Gordon Ramsay cookbook.

Follow these precise steps and you too will succeed, just as I did.

But most advice of this nature falls victim to two pitfalls, the narrative fallacy, and asymmetry of circumstances (if they're not falling victim to flat-out lies).

The Narrative Fallacy

We tend to look back on outcomes and put preceding events into a logical cause-and-effect order because this helps us to make sense of the world.

For example, an entrepreneur looking back on their success might point to these specific steps.

I built a landing page to test my idea. I ran some ads. I got some sign-ups. I used this to raise capital. I hired a team. We built the app. We promoted it with Facebook ads. We got rich.