That said, there are PLENTY of successful people who used to be a failure. In fact 99% of the successful people have been a failure at some point in their life. THESE are the people you listen to.
The things you read in the media about a genius who got it right on their first attempt are very exceptional cases, which means they were not only talented but also very lucky. And you're right that there's a selection bias when it comes to these people and they may be totally out of touch because they don't understand why they succeeded.
But like I said, the vast majority of accomplished people in the world were once failures. They just kept trying and made it happen. Which is why these people are worth listening to. They are the ones who actually learned from their past failures, applied it to their life, and finally succeeded.
But you don't deserve to tell others what you think is the right thing when only thing you've achieved in life is failure. You gotta earn it by taking the lessons you learned and applying it to come to a true success. These people are worth listening to.
From what I see, there are too many people who've never tasted success but just use their failures as an opportunity to get more attention for the sake of getting attention. Most of the times when you read their posts, they're full of "failure biases", which is much worse than success bias. And I think most of the "lessons" they learned are shit, and most of the times demonstrates exactly why they failed--because they were out of touch (which is why they think they understand why they failed)
So my point is, you should listen to people who have failed AND succeeded. There are many people like this.
