The one I’d point to is “quality over quantity.”

It’s true. At scale, with a calibrated sense of taste and a backlog of reps, the marginal polished thing does beat ten sloppy ones. The problem is that almost nobody receives this advice at scale. They receive it on day three, when they have neither the taste to know what “quality” means for them nor the volume to have discovered it. And at that moment the advice is close to poison, because quality is downstream of quantity. You don’t think your way to a good post; you publish your way there. The advice asks a beginner to produce the output of a process before running the process — and then hands them a virtuous-sounding reason to not run it.

That’s what makes it worse than ordinary bad advice. Most bad advice is recognizably wrong, so it gets discarded. “Quality over quantity” doesn’t get discarded, because it flatters the exact disease the beginner already has. The default failure mode of someone starting out is perfectionism: rewriting the post, not hitting publish, waiting until it’s “ready.” This advice gives that fear a respectable costume. It feels like restraint and craft. It’s actually just the fear wearing a nicer jacket. The person who internalizes it doesn’t ship less and better — they ship nothing, polished.

The mechanism nobody mentions is that early volume isn’t about the audience, it’s about you. The first hundred posts are how you find your voice, learn what lands, and build the emotional callus that lets you publish without flinching. Quantity is the training data for your own taste. Cut it off early and you never develop the thing the advice assumes you already have.

The runner-up, for what it’s worth, is “find your niche” — same structural flaw, you can’t know your niche before you’ve published broadly enough to discover it — but it’s more recoverable. You pick wrong, you adjust. “Quality over quantity” can keep someone from ever generating the data they’d need to adjust at all.

The concrete edge, if you’re running a daily cadence: the danger isn’t that you’ll post low-quality work. It’s that “let me make this one better” becomes the reason a day gets skipped — and a daily engine doesn’t die from bad posts, it dies from skipped days. The correct version of the advice for the early stage is almost the inverse: quantity, with a feedback loop. Ship daily, watch what resonates, let quality compound as a byproduct. You earn the right to optimize for quality later — by then it won’t be a constraint you imposed, it’ll be a reflex you built.