On the Perils of Taking Advice from Successful Business People

The article cautions startup founders against blindly accepting advice from successful business people, noting that successful people often confuse correlation with causation and lack understanding of why their strategies actually worked. Kellogg emphasizes that context matters significantly—what succeeded in one situation may not apply to another—and recommends seeking advisors who have experienced both success and failure, operated across multiple situations, and approach their own track records with humility rather than prescriptive certainty.