Regarding your last point: this is an idea I first encountered a couple years ago in Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness", and it's been on my mind ever since.

Monetizing successful people's advice on how to become successful seems seems to be a pretty profitable endeavor.

Accepting that success, among many other things, is more random than post-hoc explanations make it seem is scary yet somewhat liberating at the same time.