The most powerful advantages are invisible until you have them, obvious once you do, and completely forgotten by people giving advice. They're not skills you can learnβthey're conditions that make learning possible.
We don't optimize for what matters mostβwe optimize for what's easiest to measure and display. The most valuable work is often invisible to the systems that distribute rewards, so we abandon it for work that shows up on dashboards.
The people most qualified to give advice are often the worst at giving useful advice. Their success came from context-specific advantages they've forgotten existed, leaving them to teach universal principles that only work for people who already have what they had.