Daniel Pink shares some good ideas for ambitious young adults to mull over. He organizes this thoughts as alternatives to five common maxims that can lead people astray. However, I think he’s looking at it from a narrow perspective – these maxims can be misguided for high achievers, but they could be valuable for people who don’t know where to start.

1. “You can be anything you want to be”. That’s clearly not true, but you should consider options beyond what your parents are doing and what others have told you that you should do.
2. “Make a plan and follow it”. You can’t sketch out your life years in advance, but you do need to stop overanalyzing every decision and focus on making a move that will improve your position (ironically, Pink used chess as an analogy for trying to plan out every move, but nobody can plan out every move in chess, so expert players rely on recognizing strong positions from experience) .
3. “Follow your passion” - Here, Pink admits this advice has value, but it’s mostly a rehash of maxim 1.
4. “Always be positive” - Again, Pink acknowledges that a positive bias has value, but questions whether we should strive for perpetual positivity (as they say, “everything in moderation”)
5. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - Pink emphasizes the importance of the balance between building skills and networks, and claims that the network (and reputation) will follow naturally from building skills and achievements. That may be true if you are an outgoing, sociable person embedded among ambitious and influential people (say, at a competitive college or an innovative company), but there are also a lot of talented introverts who build skills but don’t find opportunities because they won’t go meet people, or stay stuck hanging out nonstop with old friends who don’t share their ambitions. Pink warns about taking this to extremes and basically becoming an ass-kisser (or Glamour Boy). Regardless of what strategy gets people to the top in today’s society, we can still hold onto some self respect by building our own abilities rather than being a parasite.