The self-made stories

Accounts of business success are written backwards from the result, which means they are shaped by everything the person telling them now knows and did not know at the time.

Every account of how someone succeeded shares a structure. There is an early hardship, a moment of clarity, a difficult bet, and a vindication. The structure is satisfying and it is imposed after the fact, because the person is now standing at the end of the story and can see which of their many decisions turned out to matter.

This does not make them liars. It makes them narrators, which is a different problem and a harder one to correct for.

What the structure hides

Three things get removed in the telling. The first is the number of other bets placed at the same time, most of which went nowhere and are not interesting enough to survive the edit. The second is the base rate: how many people made a similar decision and are not being interviewed. The third is the specific starting conditions, which are usually mentioned once and then never weighted.

Remove those three and almost any sequence of events can be told as a lesson.

“Nobody narrates the version where the same decisions did not work.”

Advice ages badly and travels worse

Advice drawn from a particular market at a particular moment is often correct about that market and that moment and nothing else. The parts that transfer tend to be dull and general: understand what your buyer values, watch your cash, do not depend on one source, write things down. The parts that feel electrifying and specific are usually the parts most tied to conditions that no longer exist.

A more useful way to read them

Read for mechanism rather than for outcome. Ignore what the person achieved and look for the sentence explaining how a particular thing worked: how a price was justified, how a first customer was found, what a term in an agreement was worth. Those sentences are frequently buried, because they are unexciting, and they are the only part with any transfer value.

Then check the mechanism against your own case rather than against the story's ending. The ending is the least portable component in the whole account.

A worked example

Someone describes turning down a large early customer in order to keep control of their direction, and it worked. Read as outcome, the lesson is to turn down large early customers, which is dreadful advice for most people most of the time.

Read as mechanism, the interesting question is what made refusal survivable: presumably enough cash to last, an alternative source of demand, and a clear view of what the customer would have required. Those three conditions are checkable in your own situation. The lesson is not refuse, it is know which three conditions make refusal affordable.

What to do this week

Take the last piece of business advice you found compelling and write down the conditions under which it would be wrong. If you cannot name any, you have not understood it yet, you have only agreed with it.