Arsenal of Advice

People usually think of advice as a shortcut in the race for whatever we're searching for. Once you find the ultimate piece of advice, all you have to do is follow it and you'll be set. But no, this isn't how advice works. Most advice is subjective and worked for a specific person in a specific moment for a specific reason, and the realization that their success stemmed from that piece of advice is often realized only in hindsight. Plus, for every source telling you to workout in the morning, there are a dozen more telling you to workout at night. When I was trying to build healthier habits, I read blog posts telling me to start slow and build one habit at a time while other blog posts told me to turbocharge my life and become the person I want to be in 10 years in 1 year, leaving me even more confused and lost than before. I only found out what worked for me after trying both approaches, so my advice to you is to apply advice to see if it works before wholeheartedly accepting it.

Irony aside, I do have some thoughts on making advice more useful. As an expert advice receiver, I have successfully received and promptly forgotten thousands of tips and tricks to succeed in life. As a novice advice applier, I can share a couple ways that I manage to understand and use pieces of advice to help me in my endeavors. An analogy that I think applies well is to treat advice not as a shortcut, but as a tool that we must teach ourselves how to use and in which situations they work best. Just like how a hammar specializes in nailing wood but not drilling holes, pieces of advice can help us make informed decisions or cloud our judgement depending on how we use them. Now let's learn how to build our arsenal of advice! [1]

My first revelation about advice slowly developed as I sat through dozens and dozens of panels and talks from famous CEOs and celebrities that gave me and my fellow students their homerown advice to succeed in life. I've been very fortunate to be able to attend these, but I couldn't help but feel jaded by similar flavors of the same advice popping up over and over and leaving me excited but without any tangible change to my life, leading to my conclusion that simply knowing advice doesn't help you improve or change your life at all.

While this seems obvious, it's deceptively easy to listen to advice and feel motivated for an hour, then plop back into your routines without any notable difference from how you were before the advice. The observation to make here is that to gain wisdom from advice, we need to do more than just listen and nod along. So what should we do? Well that's obvious... we just apply the advice to multiple situations and learn from the results of our decisions right? Yes this is a great way to understand advice better, but it requires either extreme planning or extreme luck. If you make a list of all the advice you've every gotten and systematically test them in different situations, then you are amazing and should write a blog post about it. If you're like most people and wait for your mind to remember bits of advice in the middle of the decision making process, then you probably see how random this is. Lucky for us, there are ways to make this lottery run more in our favor.

In order to improve on when relevant advice pops up, we need to understand how thoughts surface. The way I see it is that for anything we learn in the past, there's a chance that what we learned surfaces to our conscious mind and becomes a thought. So our goal is to increase the chances that a relevant piece of advice surfaces when we're in a particular situation. Now it makes more sense why listening to advice usually doesn't change the way we make decisions as we wouldn't know what situations that piece of advice could apply to. This leads us to a solution where we actively analyze a piece of advice to see what scenarios it would help us in, thereby linking that advice to a set of situations and increasing the chances the advice surfaces when we're in one of those situations.

As for how to analyze a piece of advice, I've found that thinking about the pros and cons helps tremendously in determining what types of situations it works and doesn't work in. For example, a common piece of advice is to not be a complainer. Pros for not complaining include improved social reputation and a more positive atmosphere. Cons for not complaining include inefficiencies due to lack of communication. This analysis implies that we should complain when it could improve our situation but not when we're chatting with friends or during an interview.

If we keep doing this analysis for the advice we get, we'll begin to notice patterns between situations and specific behaviors. As demonstration, let's say that someone gives you the advice to "exercise more." After exercising for a week, you find that you feel more energy and are more positive about life. Wait a minute... remember that other piece of advice that encouraged positivity? Oh yeah! It was "not complaining." Now we've created a link between positivity, "not complaining," and "exercise." Fast forward a day and you're hanging out with friends, but they're complaining about school and the group is feeling a little down. Wait they're "complaining"... to make people happier, we can suggest going on a walk to get people exercising, which would encourage them to feel more positive and complain less.

That scenario sounds very staged but it can happen more often than you think if you actively make these connections. I like to think that the people that are super wise and seem to have a solution for everything have developed giant webs of knowledge that magically bubble up solutions from related situations.

As some parting advice, I have a helpful tip for when you're in a panel or talk where the speakers are giving conventional advice that you've heard a million times. If you ask them to tell stories instead of advice, you might be able to learn much more and you can also test yourself by imagining you were in their shoes and see what decisions you would have made, then draw more nuanced conclusions / advice from that.

In the end, what I wrote here are my thoughts and experiences with advice, so in a way these ideas are my own advice, so read critically and hope you enjoy the irony :)

Footnotes

1: To clarify, when I say "advice" I refer to the often word-of-mouth tips and tricks that people give to other people that are opinionated. Advice such as "if you want to be healthier, eat and sleep better" is not what I refer to. Advice such as "if you want a happier life, work at a startup over a big tech company" is what I refer to. ↩