For years, I worried about the wrong thing.
Every time I sat down to write something about entrepreneurship, I’d ask myself the same question: Is this original? Has anyone said this before? I wanted my advice to stand out — some fresh insight nobody else had stumbled onto.
That was exactly backwards.
The internet is drowning in startup advice. And most of us assume the good stuff is the rare stuff — the secret nobody else has figured out, the contrarian take, the angle you haven’t heard yet. But the most valuable advice I know isn’t the advice that’s different. It’s the advice that keeps showing up, again and again, from people who have nothing to do with each other.
Because that’s the only proof it actually works.
You can’t trust a one-hit wonder
Here’s the problem with taking advice from someone who succeeded once — especially someone who knocked it out of the park on their first swing. They don’t actually know why it worked.
When you’ve only done something a single time, you can’t separate the signal from the noise. You can’t tell what worked because of what you did versus what worked in spite of it. You can’t tell skill from luck. You just know you won — and you assume everything you did along the way was the reason.
It usually wasn’t.
I waited sixteen years to write my book about Netflix. It took me that long to look back honestly and figure out which decisions actually mattered. Which ones were smart. Which ones were lucky. Which “failures” turned out to be the best things that ever happened to me.
Take Blockbuster. The day they laughed Reed and me out of their offices, I was crushed. I was certain I’d just failed to save the company — the biggest failure of my career.
Was it? Or was it the single luckiest break Netflix ever got?
I couldn’t have told you back then. It took years — and a lot more experience — before I could see it clearly. Time gives you that answer. One success never will.
Why I trust the stuff I keep hearing
This all snapped into focus recently when I read Kaz Najatian’s “blueprints” — his principles for how to work. And reading them was a strange experience, because I kept recognizing my own stuff.
His first one — trust your people, assume they’ve got your back — is Freedom and Responsibility by another name. Another is just radical honesty. And one of them captures the exact reason I’ve always loved writing: you can’t fool yourself on paper the way you can in conversation.
None of that overlap made his advice feel less original to me. It made it feel more true.
Think about what’s actually happening there. Two people who built different companies, in different industries, at different times, by completely different paths — and they land on the same lesson. Two people who never compared notes, coming back with the same scar.
When that happens, pay attention. That’s the advice that transcends one person’s luck.
So here’s my advice about advice
Stop hunting for the secret nobody else has discovered. The unique insight, the clever hack, the edge you’ll have because you alone know it — that’s mostly a fantasy. And chasing it is a great way to talk yourself out of the boring guidance that actually works.
Look for the patterns instead. When you hear the same thing from a founder, a mentor, and a book you read ten years ago — that’s not noise. That’s the signal you’ve been ignoring
Thanks for reminding us that the best advice is often the stuff we hear over and over again from different people.
I appreciate your energy and thoughtfulness so much.