Challenge every single alleged token of wisdom that you hear from these entrepreneurial sages. They may be honest, but they’re honestly inaccurate– the advice they offer has no empirical foundation
6 answers from the community
What are you talking about? "Entrepreneurial sages" and "No empirical foundation" - go look up what the word empirical means and look up the word foundation and ask yourself or anyone else why would you or they refer to anyone as an entrepreneurial sage that didn't or doesn't have their own company. Advice is always based on an interpretation of someone's own experience.... Really don't understand your confession.
I think he means that there's a lot of bs advice out there.
Some startup failed CEOs say "don't listen to your customers", others "we failed because we didn't listen to our customers needs".
My opinion for that example is that yes listen what features your customers want, but define the vision of your product/company yourself (which I think no one else can do, otherwise they should replace you in your position).
Very often they try too much to put a complex story into 1 sentence advice, which I think is completely useless without putting it into proper context.
There's a huge and increasing amount of 'cargo cult-type behavior' in business nowadays.
The kicker is that 'the blind lead the blind (or at least those who're not looking)' is becoming normal/accepted/respected/clamored-toward.
in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king
There's a serious, and much under-acknowledged point, lurking here... that many of those who're currently seen as 'examples to follow' really don't merit such attention and respect - and succeeded <em>inspite of</em> rather than specifically because of what they did... and got lucky by floating to the top in a rising tide (or got undue investment from others with greed and/or better-not-miss-this fear and more money than sense... which is of course the cash-out strategy of many venture companies - a hypey IPO at a price greater than true value).
I'm more curious as to which sages the OP is referring to.