117 - Don't Take Advice 💬❌
Hey there, !
1.
I consume self-help and motivational advice type reddit threads, books, articles, podcasts and videos voraciously, hoovering up everything I can on advice for everything - mainly learning, decision-making and how to be a Good Person (tm).
How else are you supposed to learn from the life experiences of others?
I live in my head a lot, thinking through every problem I can. However, I have learnt the value, especially through lockdown, of action as information (which I had previously devalued). They say ‘write what you know’ and I only know how to think in circles so welcome to my world.
2.
How do you know if the advice you’re reading about is right for you?
It’s all about the context.
There’s a lot of advice on the internet. Much of it sits at the level of super generic rules of thumb that ‘everyone’ should follow, followed by specific recommendations of things to buy, things to watch, or things to do (i.e. trying to sell stuff to you).
Obviously, they write like this for a purpose - it’s to help appeal to a more generic audience and get more engagement. Perniciously, specific recommendations try to slip through the cracks and get to the juicy core of ‘what we think you want’ with varying levels of success (the dreaded Algorithm is supposed to help advertisers get straight to your eyeballs).
But when you seek the same advice from the people around you, it’s a much different process. You’re able to provide much more context about your problem, and you get the instant feedback of questions to uncover further understanding.
Sometimes, the thing you’ve asked about isn’t the thing you were actually trying to work out.
This is a much more useful way of seeking advice, because you’re getting specific recommendations with your context. You rely on the person you’ve confided in to be trustworthy, and able to give you good advice as well; this can be hard to find.
I use the concept of believability when assessing approaches, models or even people for advice. This is a concept from Ray Dalio’s book Principles, which he says he uses to identify how much weight he should give to advice provided by the smart people he’s hired around him. Essentially, it’s identifying:
- Have they done this successfully before? (usually, at least 3 times)
- Can they explain why it’s been successful when probed?
It doesn’t mean that their advice is discounted if they aren’t believable, but if it’s armchair philosophizing versus practical experience…well, practical experience is usually going to win out. It’s an example of Roosevelt’s famous ‘man in the arena’:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
3.
A model I use to think about this is ‘the map is not the territory’.
The thinking is like this: all maps are a higher level of abstraction away from the actual territory it describes. It’s a description with vivid greens, blues and browns, with lines that criss-cross the map trying to tell you exactly what the elevation is at different places, where the roads are, how you can get to your friend’s place.
However, if you think about it, you actually lose a TON of information looking at a map. Can you see the actual rocks that are there? Is there a description of the placement of every single tree? Dead trees that have fallen over? What does the cliff actually look like?
Who knows! The map isn’t the territory; for the map to be directly useful, it would have to be exactly as big as the territory it describes. And if that was the case, it would paradoxically be useless, because you’d just be…in the territory itself.
The understanding to extract here is that though there are mental models and generic pieces of advice that can serve as good rules of thumb, you have to use your own judgement to deal with issues as they come up in real life.
All models are wrong, but most are helpful.
4.
So…how do you get better at judgement?
Just like a kid, you experiment. You have to try things out, and see what works. If one day you decide not to bring an umbrella when it says it’s going to rain, well, maybe next time you do bring an umbrella.
Oh, this time it was sunny? Well there’s another data point for you.
It doesn’t have to be anything formal - it’s more that you just keep your mind open to learning opportunities - when have you done something wrong and why? Seek further advice and experiment with that! Does it work for you? Great! If it doesn’t, discard it and find something else.
This is the whole action is information point that I’ve mentioned a few times. It’s not something that I’m good at it but I’m getting better at it.
I started running during the pandemic, trying to take some time out of my day every day to keep fit. I read a lot of advice of how you should motivate yourself to run, how you should prepare things advance so the activation energy of actually going out to run is low, and making sure you run on the right surfaces so you don’t hurt your joints.
But none of that explains to you the experience of how short of breath you can get, really easily. Or that the mental fight to push through the pain is actually really hard. Or that running on grass is kinda hard if the ground has knobbly bits here and there.
This is why you have coaches, who can give you timely, in-the-moment feedback. They can tailor their advice to your particular body, what you’re training for, and identify what you need to work on.
…but I’m a cheapskate so I’ll just learn by myself :D
5.
I remember linking this article a while ago To be creative, Chinese philosophy teaches us to abandon ‘originality’. I think about it a lot, especially this particular story:
In this short vignette, a wheelwright known as Pian (扁) tells a duke that the book of sages’ advice he’s reading is nothing but ‘chaff and dregs’. Angered, the duke demands an explanation. The wheelwright responds that, at least concerning his craft, he can create what he does only because he’s developed a ‘knack’ for it that can’t be wholly conveyed in words. If the blows of his mallet are too gentle, his chisel slides and won’t take hold. If they’re too hard, it bites in and won’t budge. ‘Not too gentle, not too hard – you can get it in your hand and feel it in your mind,’ he says. ‘So, I’ve gone along for 70 years and at my age I’m still chiselling wheels. When the men of old died, they took with them the things that couldn’t be handed down. So, what you are reading there must be nothing but the chaff and dregs of the men of old.’
I also remember writing about not liking recipes because they were so prescriptive:
I didn’t know how my inputs would affect the outputs. What happens if I add this lemon in here? Or this bay leaf? Or Shaoxing wine? I don’t understand why we put all these things together (soy sauce, sugar, corn flour) and then just use that sauce on like…everything. Why? How does it work?
…
[O]nce you’ve mastered a little more of the basics, you’ll be able to understand why some tried and true recipes from your parents have been passed down the ages, and why they’re so delicious.
People used to learn from oral stories, and passed down hard-fought lessons from their parents and surrounding community for the longest time. Advice comes easier when you’re in the same context, with the same people, in the same place. This means that it’s important to identify where the advice is coming from, and what parts of it apply to you (if any). If someone tells you that it would be great to put all your savings into an ETF…do they have the same financial position as yourself? Do they have a lot more disposable income than you? Does it align with your goals?
Regarding books or internet advice, it’s also good to try and understand why the person has written the advice in the first place! Do they get any benefit from you doing that particular action (e.g. buying NFT’s)? Are they trying to cover a similar problem in a similar context to you? I see this mainly with ‘marketing’ blogs for brands that try to ‘help’ the community but in the end just say ‘hey we offer this services ourselves so…’
Don’t be a sucker!
Phew - so much advice, so little time. So what?
Takeaway: Get better at adapting advice for your own context. This can come in a few forms, including:
- Experimentation: Just try it out and see what happens! Action is information, so you get a bit more of an idea around whether it works for you.
- Identification: …of the underlying motivating factors of why this person has given this advice, and what scenario / context they might have been thinking about.
- Believability: I’ll link this piece based on Ray Dalio’s Principles - essentially, get better at assessing how believable someone is when they’re giving you advice. Have they done it before? Successfully? Multiple times? Can they explain why? Great, then they might have something going on…
Is this good advice? I don’t know - you’ll have to adapt it to your own life to know ;)
Chat soon :)
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