On The Futility of Offering Advice

Which is another way of saying: good advice is contextualized. It accounts and expands for difference. Bad advice delivers itself as universal

It's unfortunate because too much of a good thing (and it is a good thing – shrewd and well-intentioned people sharing the things that have helped them), when consumed in a frantic haze, becomes a bad thing (a cacophony of voices shoving advice down your throat, bolstering your belief that there's something you're doing wrong and if you just fixed ... See more

The advice has no value until it is parsed into specific know-how that applies in certain kinds of moments. Once it is, it begins to transform the person.

So let’s look at some ways that advice is biased. Lottery numbers: When successful people give advice, I usually hear it like this: “Here are the lottery numbers I played: 14 29 71 33 8. They worked for me!” Success is based on so many factors. Some are luck. Some are not. It’s hard to know which are which. So which do you learn from? Underdog opin

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The personal development / productivity space is littered with conflicting advice of varying utility. It attracts the intellectually promiscuous. Commitment-phobic concept sluts endlessly dabble with frameworks and tools, hoping to someday reach a moment of certainty when they’ll finally take action…99% of self-help is escapism.

Advising is hard. It’s a complex activity that involves negotiating someone’s difficulty in dealing with a problem and their responsibility for dealing with it. Often, it degenerates into telling people what to do or showing off how much we know. Perhaps if more of us understood advising a little better, we could avoid giving overbearing advice and... See more

If there's any kind of lesson in all this, it's mostly some advice I want to give myself.

The lesson is simply: speak up .

It's OK to slip into advocacy now and then, so long as you do it tastefully. If it sounds high- or heavy-handed — or anything like nagging — you're doing it wrong. Just explain why you care about a particular value. The goal isn'... See more