Tuesday morning, October 7th. Watching a senior engineer tell a junior to "just talk to the VP about your ideas" without realizing they've forgotten what it feels like when talking to VPs isn't "just" anything.

The most powerful advantages don't feel like advantages when you have them. They feel like the basic rules of reality. That's why people who have them give such bad advice to people who don't.

The Invisibility of Context

Here's what I've noticed: every substantial advantage operates by changing what seems possible. Not what you theoretically know is possible, but what feels available to you as an actual option you might take.

When you don't have money, "just quit your job and start a company" isn't advice—it's fiction. When you have money, it's obvious. The person with a year of runway forgets they have it, looks at the person without it, and genuinely cannot understand why they won't "take the leap." The runway isn't part of their conscious model of their own decision-making. It's just the invisible ground beneath their feet.

When you don't have connections, emailing someone important feels like shouting into the void. When you have connections, it's obvious that if you email someone thoughtful you'll probably get a response, because that's just how email works. The person with connections forgets that their messages go into different mental buckets than messages from strangers. They experience email as "just reaching out," and cannot comprehend why others won't "just reach out."

When you don't have credentials, people question everything you say and you have to earn credibility with every interaction. When you have credentials, people listen first and question later. The person with credentials experiences themselves as persuasive because they make good arguments, not because a PhD or company name on their bio preloads credibility. They've forgotten what it feels like to make the exact same argument and have it dismissed as unserious.

In every case, the advantage isn't that you can do something others can't. It's that something obvious to you is invisible to others, and you've forgotten it was ever otherwise.

Why Obvious Advantages Persist

These advantages are particularly durable because they don't look like advantages. They look like personality traits.

The person with financial runway appears more risk-tolerant. They're not—they're just taking smaller actual risks than it appears, because they have safety nets. But "risk tolerance" sounds like a character trait, so everyone treats it as something to admire and emulate rather than something to distribute more equitably.

The person with strong networks appears more charismatic or ambitious. They're not necessarily—they just have more opportunities to be helpful to important people, which makes them seem more valuable. But "charismatic" sounds like an intrinsic quality, so everyone treats it as innate rather than partially constructed by having access that creates opportunities to build reputation.

The person with credentials appears more competent. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't—but they get the benefit of the doubt more often, which means they get more chances to be right publicly. But "competence" sounds like a skill, so everyone treats it as earned rather than amplified by advantage.

This misattribution is crucial. If advantages look like character traits, then the people who have advantages can feel good about having them (I earned this through my personality) and the people who don't have them can feel bad about not having them (I lack these personality traits). Nobody has to confront the uncomfortable reality that opportunity often precedes the traits we use to justify it.

The Advice Failure Mode

This is why so much advice is useless or actively harmful. It's written by people who have obvious advantages they no longer notice, for people who don't have those advantages and are trying to compensate.

"Just be yourself" is excellent advice if being yourself has historically worked. It's terrible advice if being yourself gets you dismissed or filtered out. The person giving the advice remembers all the times being authentic paid off, and doesn't remember (or never knew) what it's like when your authentic self doesn't fit the template of what decision-makers recognize as valuable.

"Focus on doing great work and recognition will follow" is excellent advice if you're in an environment where great work is visible and recognized. It's terrible advice if you're in an environment where great work by people like you gets attributed to luck or circumstance, while mediocre work by people with more obvious advantages gets celebrated as exceptional. The person giving the advice has only ever worked in environments where their work was legible, so they assume work quality and work recognition are tightly coupled everywhere.

"Network by being helpful" is excellent advice if your help is valued. It's useless advice if you don't have the positioning, credibility, or access to make your help visible to people who matter. The person giving the advice has been in a position where their offers of help were taken seriously, and they've forgotten what it's like when offers of help read as presumptuous or irrelevant.

The advice isn't wrong for people who have obvious advantages. It's just catastrophically incomplete for people who don't.

What Actually Helps

If you have obvious advantages: your job is to notice them and name them. Not in a performative guilt way, but in a "here's what actually made this possible" way.

Instead of "I succeeded by working hard and taking risks," try "I succeeded by working hard and taking risks that I could afford to take because I had X, Y, and Z supporting me." The hard work was probably real. But the risk tolerance was probably purchased with advantages you didn't choose and may not have noticed.

Instead of "just do what I did," try "here's what I did, here's the context that made it possible, and here's what I think you'd need to have or substitute if you want to try something similar in different circumstances."

If you don't have obvious advantages: your job is to stop blaming yourself for not following advice that assumes you have context you don't have.

The person telling you to "just reach out" has social capital you don't have. The person telling you to "just start" has financial runway you don't have. The person telling you to "just be yourself" has identity traits that are legible as valuable in a way yours might not be yet.

None of this means you can't succeed. It means the path that worked for them might not be available to you, and you'll need to find different paths that account for your actual context. That's not a moral failing—it's just navigation.

The October 7th Recognition

The most powerful advantages are the ones that disappear from view once you have them. They become "just how things work" instead of "specific conditions that make certain actions possible."

Before you follow someone's advice, ask: what obvious advantages are they assuming I have? Before you give advice, ask: what obvious advantages am I assuming away?

The goal isn't to never have advantages or to feel guilty about having them. It's to stop mistaking advantages for character traits, and to stop assuming that what worked for you in your context will work for someone else in theirs.

The obvious advantage isn't always obvious—until you try to act without it and discover that what seemed like normal reality was actually constructed by conditions you didn't notice.

Pay attention to what seems obvious to you but impossible to others. That gap is probably measuring an advantage you have but can no longer see. And pay attention to what seems obvious to others but impossible to you. That gap is probably measuring an advantage you lack but they assume is universal.

Neither the having nor the lacking says anything about your worth. But both say something about what strategies will actually work given your real constraints.

The most useful thing successful people can do is make their obvious advantages obvious again. And the most useful thing everyone else can do is stop trying to follow advice that assumes you have advantages you don't, and start building strategies that work with the advantages you actually have.

Obvious advantages are invisible until you lose them or try to act without them. Financial runway feels like "normal prudence" until you don't have it and realize it was actually a structural condition enabling risk-taking. Strong networks feel like "being friendly" until you rebuild from zero and realize how much work your existing relationships were doing. Credentials feel like "being competent" until you change fields and realize how much credibility they were pre-loading. The advantage isn't the thing itself—it's that having it makes certain actions feel obvious while not having it makes the same actions feel impossible. Before you follow advice, check what it assumes you have. Before you give advice, remember what you have that you no longer notice.