It is sort of tangential to his point, but the Buffett example seems kind of weird to me. Investing is inherently competitive. Surely the strategy that Buffett (or any other large investor) used to get big would now be obsolete?
I agree this was a bad example. Of course people who try and copy the strategy of a very successful person are not going to be as successful themselves, because the people that come later are going to be competing with millions of others doing the same thing. If you want that level of success, you probably have to be ahead of the curve and do something different from what most people are currently doing.
Or in fields where we're fighting the universe rather than each other, trying to make progress with your hero's strategy is probably going to be very difficult -- to the extent that there's such a thing as "raw intelligence," Einstein definitely had more of it than I do, so if I was going to look into physics, I'd not want to look at the problems he didn't complete, using his strategy! (of course, this is why fields build up an increasingly advanced framework, after the trailblazers have passed through).