One of the most impactful lessons I learned from my experience at Faliam is being able to distinguish between advice that preaches the rule and the advice that preaches the exception. One of the biggest dilemmas founders face is whether or not they should continue to pursue their vision or abandon it and pursue something else. On one side, you have people like Brian Chesky and Brian Armstrong who endured a lot before their respective companies saw any success. They tend to preach to founders to "be a cockroach" and survive by any means. On the other hand, however, you have founders like Qasar Younis (who was also COO of YC) talk about how most companies that do really well, start to do well relatively quickly.
As a young, inexperienced founder its hard to determine which school of thought you want to follow. In the face of uncertainty, a lot of times its difficult to distinguish between insight and emotion. To add to the confusion, the stories that are shared most often are the emotional, triumphant stories where founders persevered through adversity and succeeded against all odds.
The stories that never get shared are the stories of the countless founders who followed that advice and ended up with a significant chunk of their life wasted in pursuit of something that was never going to be a business worth pursuing.
I certainly don't want to preach that founders should always take the more conservative approach and be ready to shut down their ideas at the first sign of adversity. Especially since the world stands to gain so much from the borderline delusional founders that push teh boundaries of reality. Rather, I want to emphasize the importance of deciding whichever path you decide to take with absolute clarity and intentionality.
Be analytical of the fact that on one side, you're making the decision to put countless years of your life on the line for something that has a substantially lower probability of success because of X,Y, or Z reason. And on the other hand, if you chose to take the alternative approach, make sure you are clear in what your motivations are and why it is that you are making that decision.