Yeah, we see a lot of these here. At one time, I thought they must be valuable, because successful people were telling everyone else, for free, what it was that

Yeah, we see a lot of these here. At one time, I thought they must be valuable, because successful people were telling everyone else, for free, what it was that made them successful. If we just followed their advice, we too could be successful. I now see it differently, and though I'm quite certain I was wrong before, I'm less certain that I'm right now. But here are my two thoughts on this anyway: First, no successful person, that I can recall, has ever credited their success entirely to following some other successful person's habits. No great inventor has said, "yeah, I just looked up Ben Franklin's habits, and followed them exactly, and here I am." People have credited other people for inspiration, for guidance, for mentorship, but if there's any evidence whatsoever that a person's success is entirely due to their habits -- that is to say, that the same success can be replicated by anyone who follows exactly the same habits -- I haven't seen it. Likewise, no successful person has ever turned out to be a clone of a previously successful person. Each one has made their own name, developing their own habits according to their own innate strengths and weaknesses. At YC, Sam Altman did not become Paul Graham; sama continued to become the most sama he could be, while pg was the most pg he could be. Second, I've reluctantly decided to believe -- careful choice of words there -- that these sorts of "prescriptions" are not only not helpful, they are unhealthy. The natural conclusion for a shlub like me, having read so many of these, is, "if that's all it took for that person to be successful, then why am I not?" Am I lazy? Perhaps. Stupid? Too arrogant? Not arrogant enough? Am I not sacrificing enough of the other things I love? Am I sacrificing the wrong things? Too many things? Have I read the wrong books? Do I have the wrong priorities? Am I broken? A lot of people are fond of saying that certain fields of study aren't science because they're not testable or repeatable enough. I submit that the nature of success has never been tested in the scientific sense. It's all, mostly, cargo-cult flim-flam. There is no way to know whether one successful individual could be born into entirely different circumstances and still come out as successful; it's unknown to what extent biology, early childhood, developmental psychology, and dumb circumstantial luck each factor in to the result. There is no equation for it, no universal constants. 25 million copies of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People have been sold. 25 million! Has it made 25 million successful people? 10 million? A hundred-thousand? Maybe I could have made different decisions and found some great success years ago. Maybe it is yet to come. (See? I've still kept my youthful naivete.) Or, perhaps, my equation long ago determined that I could only be a decent uncle, or mentor for some better programmer, or maybe just... not a shitty person. That one's still a work in progress. So there it is. I've come to see those essays "On How I Became So Successful" as approximately indistinguishable from heavily-altered Instagram photos of pretty people on beaches.