The advice was good; however, you can take a path that is not sensible yet succeed by sheer willpower, huge amounts of luck or to a lesser extent great ability.

The advice was good; however, you can take a path that is not sensible yet succeed by sheer willpower, huge amounts of luck or to a lesser extent great ability. Advice like this is intended to maximize the probability of success. To put it into a HN familiar example, don't be a single founder because single founders are x% less likely to succeed. The fact that single founders can and do succeed all the time does not make the advice bad, it just shows it to be the generalization that it is.