Extremely well-written comment! Enjoyed reading it.
To answer your last question I'd say my takeaway is "apply critical thinking to everything, this article included". As you and others point out, PG suffers from survivorship bias and likes to post-hoc rationalize how genius he was.
That definitely isn't something to learn from. One could analyze his career and maybe extract some valuable lessons from it. However I am not even sure PG is a good example at all; once some critical mass is accrued the rest of the success is pretty much inevitable.
So maybe the conclusion is: strive to achieve that critical mass with all your might? Could be.
To answer your last question I'd say my takeaway is "apply critical thinking to everything, this article included". As you and others point out, PG suffers from survivorship bias and likes to post-hoc rationalize how genius he was.
That definitely isn't something to learn from. One could analyze his career and maybe extract some valuable lessons from it. However I am not even sure PG is a good example at all; once some critical mass is accrued the rest of the success is pretty much inevitable.
So maybe the conclusion is: strive to achieve that critical mass with all your might? Could be.