Advice from people at the very top of a field is almost always survivor bias, but that is not the interesting problem. The interesting problem is that the shape of advice from the top is fundamentally different from the shape of advice you can act on. Elite advice tends to be: “work harder than anyone,” “take asymmetric bets,” “trust your instincts.” That is not advice; it is a description of what worked once.
The person one or two rungs below the top gives different advice, because they are still figuring things out consciously. Their advice is often specific, testable, and includes the failure modes. When a mid-career engineer tells me to review code before I comment on it in a PR, I can do that on Monday morning. When a legendary engineer tells me to “think in systems,” I have no idea what to do differently.
So I stopped reading books by billionaires. I started reading books by people who wrote about the middle of their careers. The advice fits in my hands. It is boring and specific and I can try it on Monday. The compound effect over a decade is larger than any biography of a legend I have ever read.