How do define success? I get there are a lot of clueless Dunning-Kruger cases writing Medium posts who are so far from competence that their ideas are worthless to anyone else, but those cases are straw men. What about the people who have some modest success but haven’t created a household name? There’s a lot more of those out there and yet they seem to get less credibility than some middle manager at Google who really had nothing to do with their success but just still gets to ride the coat tails of their success.
any success is a success as long as you truly believe it was a success deep inside.
Which means the people you're talking about are all success cases. You don't have to be a household name to be considered a success.
A food stand guy who makes a good living and has learned tons of things about life and street smarts is a huge success and we have much more to learn from those people than idiot VC funded startup entrepreneurs who con their way into raising capital and burn through all their money without making anything work. These people may even pretend they're a success by "acq-hiring" themselves to a larger company, but anyone who's actually been in a startup know that's all fake bullshit. If you get acq-hired you have failed, period. Don't listen to these people's advice either.
The specific category of people I'm criticizing are those who have nothing to show for themselves but failure. They write Medium articles on their way out, so that they can:
1. get a pat on the shoulder
2. get more exposure so that they can get a job now that they're jobless.
3. get more exposure so that they can use that false influence to keep their charade going.
4. just do what everyone else does (they genuinely think for some reason that writing a post-mortem is some sort of a ritual to celebrate the liquidation of their startup for which they raised tons of money from strangers)
Most genuine entrepreneurs I know don't do this. They instead try to analyze what they did wrong, but they're humble enough to not shout out loud to the world to listen to what they have to say about why they failed. They show the lessons learned through action, not through medium post.
