Top Performers
If we want to learn something new, get advice on how to proceed, or receive feedback on something we're doing, making, or learning, it makes sense that we might seek out folks who're known to be at the top of the reputational dogpile within the relevant realm of inquiry.
If we're starting a business, we seek out successful businesspeople to get advice on how to become successful.
If we're trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of our relationships, we ask folks who have famously healthy relationships for their advice.
If we're keen to start painting, we look to the best, most celebrated painters to see what they might tell us about how to follow the path that led them to where they are, today.
There are some problems with this assumption of "going to the top" for advice, including what's called Survivorship Bias, which says, basically, that folks who're at the top of their field don't necessarily have great advice to offer because although they did x, y, and z to get where they are, today, a whole lot of other people might have done exactly the same things and not succeeded.
Thus, although they may attribute their success to those things they did, it may be entirely different things (including variables beyond their control, like where they were born, and into what economic situation) that actually led to their success.
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