If successful people lived out the advice that they would give to their younger self as young people, would they still end up successful?

Don't marry _that_ woman!

Roger Ebert once said that even when successful people try to focus on what advice they'd give to others, they usually just end up telling them to do what they did.

And the problem with that is they leave out how they stumbled into a lucky break -- a fluke others won't be able to repeat. (Right-place-at-the-right-time moments, unique confluences of events...) Maybe the lesson here is that people giving advice have filters they're not aware of.