I totally agree with the sentiment. I am pretty skeptical of this sort of broad advice. People who achieve success did so under specific conditions. It is unclear which aspects of their strategy are universal and which were only effective under their conditions. Advice based on a broader survey of examples may be a bit better but we need to be honest about how hard it is to extract meaningful insights from this sort of thing. Even something like the time period you picked your examples from has huge implications for what you are studying.