I've been noticing something in the endless stream of expert advice on podcasts and LinkedIn. Successful people give terrible advice to people who aren't successful yet.

Not intentionally, I presume. They genuinely believe what they're saying. But they're speaking from their current reality, not from the stage most of their audience is actually at. They've forgotten what it took to get where they are.

The founder who now preaches work-life balance? Didn't see their family for three years while building the business. The one advocating sustainable growth? Burned through their savings and maxed out credit cards. The one telling you to focus and say no? Said yes to everything for five years straight until something stuck.

This isn't dishonesty. It's memory distortion. Once you've arrived somewhere, your brain rewrites the journey to align with who you are now. The person who worked 90-hour weeks convinces themselves it was really about focus. The person who threw everything at the wall now remembers being strategic from day one.

When distorted advice meets reality

I watched this play out with a client a few years back. Mid-sized service business, about £800K revenue, hungry to scale. The founder had been consuming content from a particular business guru who'd built and sold multiple £50M companies. All the advice was about systems, delegation, protecting your strategic thinking time.

Sounded sensible. The founder hired a COO, brought in a head of operations, started blocking out two days a week for "strategic work." Revenue flatlined within six months. The team was confused about direction. Clients were getting inconsistent service. The founder was frustrated that the business wasn't running itself.

The problem wasn't the advice. At £50M, with established processes and a senior team, protecting strategic time makes perfect sense. At £800K, with a business still figuring out its model? The founder's involvement in delivery was what made the thing work. Removing it too early broke the engine.

That guru's advice was solid for where he was. Catastrophic for where my client was.

The identity problem

Most founders can't tell you what they actually did at your stage. They can't access it anymore. And here's why: their current identity depends on a particular narrative about how they got here.

The person who succeeded through relentless hustle and saying yes to everything now sees themselves as strategic and disciplined. Admitting they were scattered and reactive for years doesn't fit that identity. So the memory adjusts. They remember being more intentional than they were. More focused. More balanced.

The ones who can remember accurately? They often won't say it publicly, because what actually worked involved things they now consider unsustainable, unmarketable, or embarrassing. The messy truth doesn't make good content. It doesn't build a personal brand. It doesn't sell courses.

So you get advice filtered through two distortions: memory reshaping itself to protect identity, and conscious editing to maintain marketability.

The compounding cost

The real damage isn't just that early-stage founders follow bad advice and stall. It's that they think they're failing when they're actually just early.

I've seen founders beat themselves up for not having systems when they should be out selling. For not delegating when they can't afford to hire properly yet. For not protecting their energy when what they actually need is to expend every bit of it finding out what works.

They compare themselves to people solving completely different problems and conclude they're doing it wrong. So they either quit or they keep trying to implement summit-stage solutions at base camp, wondering why nothing's gaining traction.

Meanwhile, the businesses that do break through at the early stage? They're comfortable with mess. They're scattered until they figure out what matters. They work unsustainable hours until they find something worth sustaining. They look nothing like the polished advice-givers tell them they should look.

And in five years, when they're successful? They'll rewrite their own history, forget the chaos, and start giving the same distorted advice to the next generation of founders still at base camp.

The cycle perpetuates itself. The people at the summit can't remember the climb. The people climbing can't see the summit clearly through all the noise. And everyone in between is trying to follow directions that don't match the terrain they're actually on.