Do this before you follow a successful person’s advice

Successful people love to share their stories—as they should. 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. 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. People remember the obstacles they overcame because overcoming them required effort, but they stop noticing the advantages they benefited from because people rarely remember what’s easy. 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. What bothers me about the “quit and start your own company” advice is how reductive it is. It reduces entrepreneurship to a choice, one that tests a person’s courage and conviction in themselves. Essentially, it is the same Ame…