Stephen Shapiro opens a new video series and presents his core advice: "Ignore all advice." He argues that success stories are often misleading due to undersampling of failures, confusion between causation/correlation/coincidence, and contextual differences that make "best practices" non-transferable. He urges skepticism: evaluate advice for credibility, relevance, and causal logic rather than copying others' tactics.
Chapters
Foreign. Hi, this is Steve Shapiro, and today is the start of a new project for me. I'm going to be creating these videos for you, the people who are out there following me on my blog, because I want to share some perspectives and insights that I've seen over the years and in terms of what helps organizations and individuals be successful. And today I want to talk about something which I shared in my Success magazine article. And the question that I was asked is, what is the best piece of advice I could possibly give someone? My number one piece of advice, Ignore all advice. See, here's the reality. No one really knows why they are successful. It may have worked for them, but it may not work for you. And even if they've studied all the successful people, that doesn't necessarily mean that it is the reason why they were successful. If I got a group of people together who are wildly successful and I looked for common patterns, I might discover that all successful people shower. Now, we might obviously incorrectly conclude that showering was their key to success. Now, of course, if you don't shower, well, that might hurt your success. But just because people shower doesn't make them successful, because there's a lot of people who do shower and they aren't successful. This is called the under sampling of failure. Basically, what that means is that we tend to look at the successes, but we don't look at the failures. For every person who has tried a particular strategy to be successful, there are a hundred people who tried that same exact tactic or the same exact strategy and were unsuccessful. But we don't hear about them, we don't know about them, nobody talks about them unless they're some kind of catastrophic failure and then they're on the COVID of the Wall Street Journal of the New York Times. But all the other people out there who've tried a lot of things and worked really hard, well, maybe they didn't make it to the COVID of the newspaper, and therefore we've never heard of them. So we can't just look at successes. We also have to look at the failures. It's also important for us to understand that there's a big difference between causation, correlation, and coincidence. So someone may have done something and it appears that they were successful, but we don't know what caused which. Were they successful and as a result, they were able to get these particular results, or were these results causing their success? And it's very difficult in many cases for people to know what caused what because, well, we can't really study it properly. And in many Cases, it could just be coincidence. I did this, I got this result. But guess what? That is just a coincidence. There's also the issue of people just not even being connected to the real world. I remember one time I went to a conference where the person, a very, very well known person, was going to share his secrets to marketing success. And I remember this clearly. He said, if you can get your face on the COVID of a major magazine, that will help you be successful. Now I thought to myself, oh, why didn't I think of that before? Now here, here's the reality. He was successful so he could get his face on the COVID of the magazine. He couldn't have done it the other way around. I don't see Fortune magazine calling me up to put me on their cover anytime soon. So we need to understand the sequence of events, what causes something, and also recognizing the fact that, look, just because something works for someone else, and maybe it truly does, doesn't mean it's right for you. The reason why my book is called Best Practices are Stupid is three reasons. Number one, if you are someone who is trying to replicate someone else's best practice and they are competitive of yours and they're ahead of you, let's face it, by the time you are able to replicate their best practice, they're on to the next practice. But that's the easy one. The second one, we need to understand the fact that what works for one person or one organization may not necessarily work for you. We also need to understand the context. You know, we read a lot about things like Google's 20% rule, but if you actually study Google's 20% rule, it wasn't even an innovation strategy, it was a retention strategy. They did this as a way of keeping their best researchers. So we need to understand that. We also need to understand that what works for one culture may not work for our culture. Trying to replicate what works in Apple may not work for you. If you have a bureaucratic or risk averse culture or if you're in an industry that is highly regulated, there may be things you need to do differently. But again, the third reason why best practices are stupid is because we don't even really know that this practice was the key to their success. How many other companies or how many individuals have done exactly the same thing with a fundamentally different result? They implemented a best practice, but they did not get the results. That tells me there's no causation. Now we need to understand these things to know whether or not we're doing the right thing. So I want people to be skeptical. I want people to be critical. I want people anytime somebody gives you some advice, I want you to pause and I want you to ask yourself, a is this advice credible? Like, who is it coming from? B, is it relevant to me? And C, does it really make sense, even if it comes from a credible person? Have they logically thought, thought through and understood whether or not this is truly their key to success? This is Steve Shapiro. I look forward to seeing you again soon with more videos on perspectives on innovation and success.
