Transfer trouble

Your evidence came from a different person, context, scale, or incentive regime and is being stretched past its borders.

A famous founder declares "never niche down," and you're ready to rebuild your solo consulting positioning around it by Friday. Look at where his evidence lived: venture-funded software, 200 employees, a market of millions, and a sales team. You sell your own hours and need ten good clients a year, not ten million users.

This diagnosis names the failure: evidence generated in one person, context, scale, or incentive regime is being stretched past its borders, where it stops being evidence. The cue is borrowed advice arriving from a world structurally unlike yours. Steps: name the regime the lesson came from (scale, funding model, market size); list the differences that touch the mechanism (broad positioning works when a sales team qualifies leads; a solo consultant's pipeline runs on being findable for one specific thing); check whether the causal mechanism survives the trip at all; then keep what transfers and discount what doesn't. What changes is that famous advice shrinks from commandment to hypothesis, sized to your actual situation and testable there. The exemption: some mechanisms are genuinely context-free, and when the underlying cause doesn't depend on regime, transfer freely rather than reinventing what's already known.