[slap_shot]

I've thought a lot about this recently: what type of person is subject to a greater amount of variance in the outcome of something due to good/bad advice than a founder?

Other professions with the potential for drastic upticks of success or net worth (e.g. a professional athlete, an entertainer) are so standardized that the advice to follow is pretty much down the center of the fairway.

Given the complexity/uniqueness of a company and its market, almost any piece of advice given to a founder is at best inadequate, at worst, gravely detrimental.

Paul Buchheit had a slide at founder school that read something like "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Over generalization" - I have no idea if I interpreted it correctly, but most advice I've received (and thought was great at the time) ended up being wrong. The people giving me the advice weren't being malicious - they were just looking at my problem with _their_ life experience and abstracting it a very general way.

And the worst part is - and I say this with a lot of experience - when someone else's advice was wrong, you can't blame them, you can only blame yourself.