An interesting concept. If you want to succeed but cannot see the solution, spend a lot of time thinking about how you might fail, then just don't do that.
That is, failure isn't always caused by me doing something. Sometimes it's caused by something external. My wonderful new box might not ship if we can't get the chips to make it? I should probably look at lining up a second source. (Yeah, a couple of years ago we saw that that may not work. You can't always prevent everything bad that can happen. You can prevent some of them, though, and it makes enough difference to be worth trying.)
I see the value here being: when you can’t understand the causal relationships for success, use the causal relationships for failure that you can understand and then avoid specific failure modes.
“Friend gives generally bad advice” is not that kind of a clear causal relationship.
Not only did I buy a Zune, I was an early enthusiastic customer of their streaming subscription service and thought that it would topple the iTunes sales model. We all know how well that went.