Business Advice
From Zanecorpwiki
Here's some advice on advice: get as much as you can, but always take it with a grain of salt. Unless you're very lucky (and probably paying a lot) whatever advice you get is not going to be tailored to your situation. In fact, you and your circumstances will be irrelevant.
Most advice is really just a re-hashing of the advisor's personal, anecdotal experience. If the advisor made it big by bootstrapping, he'll tell you to bootstrap. If the advisor made it big with venture funding, then she'll tell you to get funding.
The first thing is to be careful of the facts. Often the stories you hear aren't so much a recounting of the past as they are a mythology the advisor is trying to build up around themselves. I once heard a guy tell me about "pulling himself up by the bootstraps" only to find on further querying that his father had given him an unsecured, million dollar loan to buy his first business. Pretty fat bootstraps.
Second point: most people that make it get lazy. There's nothing wrong with this... the option to be lazy is part of the reason we all want to be successful. But it means that you'll usually get a monologue and rarely have conversations. Advisors like to talk about themselves and dispense knowledge to the "next generation". Reconsidering their past and asking hard questions about how they made it and what mistakes they made, what was chance and what was legitimate excellence is all very hard work and something that most successful businesspeople have very little interest in.
Third point: very few people are introspective. Most people have no idea why the things that happen happen. Most people attribute success to themselves and failure to external causes. In reality the obstacles that people overcome were probably in part of their own making and the success they enjoy might not have anything to do with their own business acumen.
Fourth point: scale of success doesn't indicate much. Fact is most rich people are born rich and increasing an existing fortune is not very hard. You're probably going to learn a lot more from a guy that started from the middle class and now earns 6 figures as a consultant than you will from a billionaire who inherited millions. And it will be far more relevant. There is some bias, some selection, some social Darwinism that happens, but it's usually way overplayed. The rich and successful are often stupid, lazy, brilliant, and insane in more or less the same proportion as the general population.
