Your headline was “How do you know if you are doing the right thing”, and your text explains nothing about that. Instead, I am advised to “think about Ginny” every time I need to make a decision.

See, that’s the first problem I’m having with this pep-talk kind of reasoning: its superficiality. Why am I supposed to follow Ginny’s example? Who is Ginny anyway? What does she look like? What kind of childhood did she have? Was she ever abused? Who are her parents? How big her family? Will she ever receive an inheritance? What language she speaks? What culture, what religion? Her favorite food? Her sexual preferences? How does she deal with failure? Has she ever thought about killing herself?

There are all kinds of questions that make Ginny different from other people. And yet, in every pep talk, from network marketing conventions to fundraising campaigns to employee motivation events, over and over again we hear about Ginny. People are different, don’t you get? You can’t enter the same river twice. What worked for one person in certain circumstances will not necessarily work for all others in their circumstances.

And that’s the second problem: selection bias. It goes like this. In the same month, a thousand other girls in Ginny’s country became pregnant and got kicked out of the house. Nine hundred ninety nine of them died of hunger, became prostitutes, ended up performing an unsanitary abortion in an illegal clinic, or gave birth to a child destined for a life of poverty and destitution.

But we never hear about them — we never know them. All we hear is how successful Ginny has become. And the next girl facing this decision is advised by you to “think about Ginny”. So is the next fool about to pour his money in another startup that will surely make him rich, just like that guy over there.