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Whenever an entrepreneur makes it big with his business ideas, launching a killer product or starting a niche business, he or she will most probably end up giving advice to other hopefuls. It can be in a magazine interview that seeks to discover and describe the foundations the success was built on or at a student conference when undergraduates are desperate to know what the key to achieving so much was. With bigger names, such as star CEOs, famous billionaires or serial entrepreneurs, the fascination goes so far that they are invited to pen a guide book to what they like to call their method to getting rich, usually written by a ghost writer. The question is whether it is even possible to imitate one entrepreneur's success by following what he or she says. How much are their experiences tainted by a very specific setting of their achievements that are not necessarily universally applicable? How effective and practicable is it to rely on somebody else's instinct in business matters?
These are difficult questions to answer conclusively and the attitude to following advice can vary from person to person. Budding entrepreneurs who do not have the benefit of their own experiences are likely to fall back on stories from the past in search of inspiration and insight, but over time they become more and more independent and self-sufficient in their decisions. It is largely a matter of personality, too, as some people have a stronger sense of having to do things on their own, while others are open to ideas, feedback and other forms of outside assistance.
What is disappointing though, is that most general advice that comes from business experts, be it academics or practitioners, tends to lack originality and substance. Reading through tens of articles or blog entries on how to become successful can leave you with a lingering feeling that there is little else to business than common sense. It might be written in great style, rehashing old notions and giving them fancy new labels, but the truth is that it is more of the same thing, again and again. Another issue is lack of practical value. Of course, some random advice is not executive training, full of detail and geared towards immediate impact, but merely general guidance, wrapping things up in nice language, but one might expect more meat in it. To say that a good entrepreneur should be responsible is not just a travesty, but empty talk as well.
Probably, business does not typically thrive on careful instruction, as if taken from a manual. In fact, even with devices such as a webcam or a music player, most users learn to operate them masterfully by experimentation, good old trial and error. It works the same with most businesses that require stepping away from a well-trodden path and into the unknown. There may be very little advice, on a practical level rather than in hot-air business rhetoric, that can be distributed on that.
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