The problem with taking advice from someone who succeeded once

The problem with taking advice from someone who succeeded once — especially someone who knocked it out of the park on their first swing. They don’t actually know why it worked.

When you’ve only done something a single time, you can’t separate the signal from the noise. You can’t tell what worked because of what you did versus what worked in spite of it. You can’t tell skill from luck. You just know you won — and you assume everything you did along the way was the reason.

It usually wasn’t.

I waited sixteen years to write my book about Netflix. It took me that long to look back honestly and figure out which decisions actually mattered. Which ones were smart. Which ones were lucky. Which “failures” turned out to be the best things that ever happened to me.

Take Blockbuster. The day they laughed Reed and me out of their offices, I was crushed. I was certain I’d just failed to save the company — the biggest failure of my career.
Was it? Or was it the single luckiest break Netflix ever got?
I couldn’t have told you back then. It took years — and a lot more experience — before I could see it clearly. Time gives you that answer.

One success never will.