[timr]

"But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to."

I am mostly neutral on what you wrote, but this is just wrong. If you think that only "successful" people have valuable stories, you're drawing a very bright-line definition of success (i.e. how successful do I have to be before you'll deign to listen to my advice?), but you're also entirely discounting the value of experience. For example, I have failed at two startups now, but I could give you volumes of practical advice on how to avoid the mistakes I made. It would take you years to learn the same lessons from scratch, and some of the advice I'd give you is stuff that a "successful" entrepreneur in another field couldn't possibly know. Does this information suddenly only become useful if I have a successful startup on my Nth try?

If most of success is learning from failure, you should be trying to make that process as efficient as you can. How do you do that? By listening to the people who have failed before.

[volaski]

The reason why your advice is not as useful as you think is because chances are, if you google around, most of that lesson would be already out there. Don't take this the wrong way I mean no offense. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons and I'm sure they're all valuable lessons, just saying most of what I read online nowadays are basically rehash of what these failed entrepreneurs heard from someone else, who probably heard it from some other successful person.

My point was "why listen to failures when you can listen to people who've both failed AND succeeded, especially when most of what the former would say is a rehash of what the latter said?" Think about it. I've thought about this myself as a once-failed-entrepreneur, and come to a realization that until you actually have succeeded in life and gained enough confidence to be able to think independently AND have the confidence to share your lesson you came to independently, most of what you think you understand are basically what you heard from other more successful people. You may think otherwise, but if you think deeper, that's what you're doing.

There's nothing wrong with this on its own, but the problem is that most of the articles I'm referring to actually mislead other people into believing in some seriously wrong interpretations of why they failed, and they all stem from the fact that these people have no idea why they failed but just try to come up with their own "theory" of why they failed with their limited knowledge. There are many reasons why people fail at something. Some people make all the bad decisions yet still succeed because they made one small decision that made a huge difference. Some people make all the right decisions yet fail because they made one small decision that messed it all up. Without this COMPLETE context, your advice is not complete because it's just small tidbits that may or may not work. If this comes from someone who has succeeded at least once, you at least know this is something that has happened. But if you follow "advice" from people who have only failed, then what are you really believing?

[timr]

"The reason why your advice is not as useful as you think is because chances are, if you google around, most of that lesson would be already out there. Don't take this the wrong way I mean no offense. I'm sure you've learned a lot of lessons and I'm sure they're all valuable lessons, just saying most of what I read online nowadays are basically rehash of what these failed entrepreneurs heard from someone else, who probably heard it from some other successful person."

I don't take offense, but you're wrong. You have no idea what kind of advice or knowledge I have, but you're jumping to the conclusion that you've heard it all before.

This thread is extremely off-topic, and it feels silly to try to convince someone to listen to other people, so this will be my last post. Good luck.

[volaski]

As someone who tries to position oneself as someone with all the wisdom in the world, you sure are acting immature, closing your statement with "okthxbye" type comment.

Also, "You're wrong" is not such a mature way to engage in a conversation, and yet that's exactly how you start every comment you posted here. Could have been a productive conversation if you acted maturely.

And even though I said no offense and clearly meant it in a generic manner (and not attacking YOU), you actually sound very offended. Why are you so offended by some random guy on the Internet?

But I guess I'll never get an answer, since you're probably a man of your words and keep your promise to keep that last comment your last post :)