This is a very thought provoking post. Thanks a lot for posting it. I think for me the biggest issue for a lot of gurus or famous people for instance is what they say to do is different than their actual actions.
For instance, someone like Suze Orman who tells you to save your money and invest in stocks didn't actually become rich investing in stocks. In fact, she only has a minor portion of her wealth invested there. In her case, she mostly acquired wealth from her books and related TV shows. What she did to gain her wealth is different than what she tells other people to do.
I think ultimately people will have to not follow successful people and find their own path to success since our individual life circumstances can be so different.
Well put. There are so many examples, it is really mind boggling how people end up thinking like that
I think it also doesn't just apply to people. I think corporations also make similar mistakes. Through things like corporate benchmarking and trying to adopt other companies best practices, companies can also fail in trying to follow other successful companies. For instance, a company like Dell might fail in imitating a company like Apple since their corporate cultures are different or the market conditions were different at the time.
Excellent parallelism.