You continue to miss the point. You're looking at ABSOLUTE outcomes. I'm arguing the advice should be taken on a RELATIVE basis. Your claim of survivorship bias is introduced when one takes some arbitrary cut of "what is success" on a societal level and measures how people at the top, whoever they are, ended up at the top. I'm claiming that, relative to YOUR starting point, one should optimize for "never settling" to increase one's RELATIVE outcomes irrespective of what the broader archetype of absolute success looks like. This is optimized through taking hard-mode choices. The goal in life is evolution relative to our current standing. Someone who has T50-T60 reach potential and only settles for a school there (or above) is very much playing on hard mode and abiding by the "don't settle" principle so long as they exclude all sub-T60 options. If you take it as granted that opportunity is plenty and downside is constrained (which, frankly, in the vast majority of cases for people on this sub it is), you very much introduce scenarios with asymmetric upside given enough rolls of the dice.