1. It doesn't matter what your title is, how much expert education, training, or experience you have, or even what hard lessons that you have learned: you are not an "expert" in an area unless you are invited in as an "expert". Put another way, unsolicited advice is unwelcome.
2. Smart people want to solve their own problems. Don't offer solutions. No one will feel empowered or much of a sense of accomplishment implementing your solution. Instead tell them the challenges that they will face for various options and let them draw their own conclusions.
3. Your spouse just wants to vent, UNLESS they say "fix it" in which case they want you to fix it, where "fix" means "make it act like I want it to". Your spouse does not want to know how it works so that they can fix it themselves next time, and their mental model is wrong and they don't care to correct it. Just listen, figure out what they want and do it yourself, and do it again next time even though it interrupted you and they could have fixed it themself.
Lesson I learned from this comment: you can dish out as much of heavy-handed advice as your heart desires, as long as you preface it with the phrase "things i've learned"
You apparently fail to understand the humility of stating what one has learned vs telling someone else what to do. They are very very different things.
> 3. Your spouse just wants to vent, UNLESS they say "fix it"
Or talk to your spouse, get to know them, and build a sense of what they absolutely need to know (e.g. you don't want or can't spend the rest of your life doing it for them and no one else will), what they don't need to care about, and what space of mind they're in.
You're hopefully stuck with them for a very long time, investing time and effort to understand them, and skipping the generic heuristics is probably the only advice needed.
Have you heard of the 6 geniuses? It is a book that proposes that there are 6 areas of "managing" one's self and others, and some are areas of genius and some are areas of frustration and some are competencies.
The book also proposes that spouses who are compatible tend to have complimentary areas of genius and frustration.
More to your point: if someone has an area of frustration to discern what course of action will fix, and you have that as an area of genius, then be kind about it as you probably got married because there are other ways you complement each other.
I haven't read the book, but can empathize with the complementary angle.
Yet it's just complex, and it's also a moving target. In particular, there will be areas where there's no way out of both being at least competent and self sufficient.
For instance if you live in the middle of nowhere with only a road connecting you to civilization, your partner giving up on driving can't just be a "frustration" area you cover with your "genius".
Same way if you live in the forest you won't get away with shouting and fainting every time you see a bug.
The partner might be there to help adapt, the most severe issues can be mitigated, but fundamentally there's no way out. (now I also assume most reasonable people won't just be there shouting "FIX IT"). And we're not counting the parts where both have it as frustration in the first place ("fix the printer" ?)
The "genius" vs "frustration" split looks to me decent for some cases, not good enough in others, and not applicable for the most critical stuff, with couples still needing to think long and hard about where they strike the balance on each of their areas.
>For instance if you live in the middle of nowhere with only a road connecting you to civilization, your partner giving up on driving can't just be a "frustration" area you cover with your "genius".
Different people are different. And not all people are reasonable. Some partners might really be like this, so if your partner is like this, you can either put up with it and do all the driving, or move someplace else. But the other thing to keep in mind is: you picked this partner. If your partner frustrates you this much, maybe you made a bad choice and should pick a different partner.
As someone who's had different partners in life, I highly encourage single people to be very careful about who they pick for their partner.
has this really worked for you? cause from my experience, not only is OP right, but you are are effectively telling your spouse that "we are serious business, pointless venting is not acceptable behaviour"
Welli, we are not. Some people feel entitled to pointless venting and some even think listening quiet is what is what others should do. That's spoiled child behavior
A really simple way to bypass a lot of issues is simply to ask: "Do you want my advice?" And accept "No" if that's the answer.
Often, the answer is actually "Yes", and the same advice that would have been taken as criticism if given without consent, is accepted.
All unsolicited advice is taken as criticism. But there's no rule that you can't offer the opportunity to solicit advice.
Other ways of asking might be appropriate depending on the situation, like "Do you want to hear what I would do?" or "Either is okay; I just want to know: are you looking for solutions or are you looking to vent?"
"Do you want some advice?" sounds too condescending for my taste, both from the giver and the receiver. Having moved to the United States from a European country, I have discovered that there is a particular dance that most people do in the land of the free that takes away authenticity (not to be confused with being rude, impolite or, even worse, "brutal") and inserts a kind of artificial kindness or feigned interest in the fate of others. This is also what one observes when working in the corporate world: "If I understood you correctly", "let me unpack that"--the therapization of everyday life in which the rulers are the HR people.
Instead of the ballet of "do you want my advice," it would be better to switch to "I think one of the possible courses of action is," or "I have encountered something similar in the past and, at least in spirit, this is what I found helpful." Those are minor dances that tend to work because in any case, almost no one likes to be told "do this or do that" when the one carrying the message is not the one who will suffer the consequences of the wrong action.
> Instead of the ballet of "do you want my advice," it would be better to switch to "I think one of the possible courses of action is," or "I have encountered something similar in the past and, at least in spirit, this is what I found helpful."
Strong disagree--it has to be a question. The entire point of my post is:
1. Ask for consent before giving advice.
2. If they say no, don't give them the advice.
This isn't "artificial kindness or feigned interest in the fate of others"--I agree that exists in the US--it's a real question where the answer really does affect what you decide to do.
"Do you want my advice" = I know how to solve it, but maybe you don't (because you are incompetent, insecure, or not ready to know the "truth") want to solve it and it's okay for you to stay with your problems, your loss, I'm out.
> "Do you want my advice" = I know how to solve it, but maybe you don't (because you are incompetent, insecure, or not ready to know the "truth") want to solve it and it's okay for you to stay with your problems, your loss, I'm out.
No, that's not what that means.
Sure, some oversensitive people will interpret it that way. That's why I provided two other ways of asking the question. "Do you want my advice?" is okay for a lot of people, though; not everyone is so sensitive they'll take offense to that.
It has to be a question, though. And really, if someone is going to assume you think they're incompetent because you ask if they want advice, you think they won't assume you'll think they're incompetent when you say, "I think one of the possible courses of action is..."?
> Your spouse does not want to know how it works so that they can fix it themselves next time, and their mental model is wrong and they don't care to correct it. Just listen, figure out what they want and do it yourself, and do it again next time even though it interrupted you and they could have fixed it themself.
Once upon a time I had someone that didn’t work this way. Only in hindsight is it apparent how much of an exception that was. I don’t know if it’s age or otherwise, but seeing someone solve their own problems is so much more satisfying than solving something for them. I think it’s an unhealthy dependency.
> 3. Your spouse just wants to vent, UNLESS they say "fix it" in which case they want you to fix it,
3a. When someone says "show me what I need to do" or similar, then they don't mean either "I need to vent" or "fix it for me".
They want to learn enough to take care of it themselves; and therefor fixing it for them - with the knowledge that the issue will recur and need the same conversation again - is a frustrating case of not listening to the real need.
> 2. Smart people want to solve their own problems. Don't offer solutions. No one will feel empowered or much of a sense of accomplishment implementing your solution. Instead tell them the challenges that they will face for various options and let them draw their own conclusions.
Boss: so, why are you recommending <thing>?
Me: someone in the Internet said it was a good idea. No, I don't know what criteria they were using to evaluate it. Or what else they considered. Or how well they understood what we're going to use it for.
---
But sure, say it's just about feelings and self-actualization and status games and nothing to do with trust and explainability.
You seem to have missed the point there.
Your boss has already invited you as the expert ( hence the pay and responsibilities), and your boss does not want to solve his problem, he wants you to do it.
But sure, you can can take any random line of any text, make up a situation with a different context and ensure a different result than the author.
I was going to object to number three, considering my spouse and I are both engineers, but to be honest, almost all the time I do just want him to "fix it".
>>Put another way, unsolicited advice is unwelcome.
You can replace advice with help and it would still be true.
Mostly people need to do things and see for themselves. Experience is felt, it can't be explained or thought.
>>Your spouse just wants to vent
Most people want empathy, not help. Like they know what they are doing and why. They just want people to understand listen and atleast pretend to understand.
1. If you are a doctor seeing another person give dangerous medical advice, it may be your civic and moral responsibility to intervene.
2. I’m smart and I have a lot of problems. Only some of them are interesting challenges (math problems… no hints!). The rest I don’t care about.
3. The only time my wife complains is when she wants a solution. Because she thinks complaining for no reason is for lazy people.
You can recast all your lessons learned in the form of dynamics instead of lessons, that’s what the author of the post did. Example: “I find it easier to learn from people when they speak of their beliefs in terms of structures and variables and forces.” That’s a true statement about me. That’s me hoping to help you without “giving advice.”
> 3. The only time my wife complains is when she wants a solution. Because she thinks complaining for no reason is for lazy people.
I want to offer a different perspective.
I sometimes complain that I live in an apartment that is too hot in the summer and lacks certain things like enough electric outlets and storage space. The rent is super cheap, so I will not move and houses are too expensive to buy. I also love living in that area cause my friends and job are near. I really don't want to hear people's advice, when; complain, because I've heard it all before and there is no solution to my problem that does not involve a ton of money.
I just want to complain because that and feeling empathy reduces stress and the keeps me healthy.
Unpacking #3 is fun. Like, yeah, often times people (not just spouses) want to vent, not receive actual advice. But "their mental model is wrong and they don't care to correct it"? That's unfair. Maybe they're just tired? Maybe your own mental model isn't the only correct one?
> even though it interrupted you and they could have fixed it themself.
Oh no, not being interrupted by having to help your partner!
(don't know how to fix this btw. It might be a boundary issue, it might be something to smile and accept, it might be an unresolvable relationship issue...)
> 2. Smart people want to solve their own problems. Don't offer solutions. No one will feel empowered or much of a sense of accomplishment implementing your solution. Instead tell them the challenges that they will face for various options and let them draw their own conclusions.
Replace "smart" by "dumb" and I'll agree. You're not smart if you reject spoon-fed solutions purely for ego-related reasons.
> It doesn't matter what your title is, how much expert education, training, or experience you have, or even what hard lessons that you have learned: you are not an "expert" in an area unless you are invited in as an "expert".
Not entirely on topic, but this makes 'experts' who have a large social media presence talking about the subject you are interested in far more likely to be invited while they might (and very often don't) know almost nothing about the subject, have no degrees (but often lie that they have) and made up their title(s). This trend is growing in the professional world. The amount of secops 'experts' I meet at companies who know nothing at all about this field besides the very basics they saw in a youtube video is incredible. I recognise them immediately as they talk too much and what they say sounds like hallucinating chatgpt (and I am not a security expert, but it intersects with what we do and need often). When I ask someone in the company (I get into companies via my own company to troubleshoot things, I don't work there, but I see a lot of them) they usually have something like 'but he is THE expert in the field on LinkedIn/Twitter (meaning, many followers and a lot of edgy shouting about the subject) so how can it be bad?'.
Anyway, you only have to watch some Joe Rogan lately to see where that is going quite rapidly. Grifter 'experts' supporting crazy grifters (yes, Terrence for instance) to make them more credible to both sell more grifter crap.
I find it very dangerous and i'm not the only one; non critical people may actually believe what these people peddle; a secops or devops that basically googles/chatgpts everything and comes with a plan cannot be good for the world now can it? If we (my company) need an expert on something, we call the university (of Delft or Amsterdam in our case as they are our alma maters) and ask which industry person with an actual degree and 10+ years industry experience we should ask for advice on xyz. Never failed us in the past 25 years; never had a twitter celeb over I am happy to say.
My spouse is a smart person. But she cares about computers about as much as I care about how billion dollar corporate partnerships are made. She just wants her computer to work and I just want my credit card to get discounts.
Or a smart overwhelmed person who comes home tired and would love not to have to consider extra problems on top of family life and their demanding job. Plenty smart in a domain and just doesn't want to think in another is a common pattern.
It's context dependent. The situation is different if it's, say, a colleague instead of your spouse. I think people are reading way too much into that part of the comment.
This is the key. People want to be heard, and also people don't necessarily divulge detail in the order you expect. The very last thing that they say may completely invalidate the solution you've been building in your mind as they've been speaking.
Back in the mid 90's I was working support for Windows NT Server. In my area we had our heavy hitters- the issues that came up several times a week- and we all knew them inside out. One day a paying support customer called and within 30 seconds of him starting to talk, I knew exactly what the problem was. I let him talk but after 5 minutes I was getting bored of minesweeper and thought maybe he'd appreciate me fixing his issue. I interrupted him and say, "hey, let's try this". Sure enough, within 2 minutes his issue was fixed. We ended the call politely and I congratulated myself on getting him to relief so quickly.
A couple weeks later we got our support survey results for the month. That customer had been surveyed and was nice enough to write something other than just give a star rating or whatever. I will never forget what he wrote:
"I don't feel like the engineer listened to me before he solved my problem."
That was a lot to unpack at the time- at first I was frustrated because he didn't give me a top score when I knocked it out of the park in my own estimation, but after a lot of reflection I've taken that lesson to heart. That person's short comment made me a better person, certainly better at support but more empathic in general, and I owe them a debt that I can't repay but will pay forward.
The problem here is that different people have different expectations. If you can fix my problem in 30 seconds and I don't have to waste 5+ minutes of my time describing the problem when you've already seen it and know the fix, I would prefer that you just stop me and fix it. However, that other guy obviously doesn't care about saving time, and wants to waste your time and his by venting and a known issue. Unfortunately, there's no way to know which type of service a customer wants unless you already know that customer well.
There are lots of situations where listening is the priority, and I'm glad you learned something for everyday life, but limiting excess explanation in a minimally rude way is a good thing for tech support. And allowing an extra 5 minutes is more than enough for being minimally rude.
You'd be surprised how many people will contact tech support mainly to complain and view getting their problem fixed as secondary.
Back when I did tech support I spent a lot of time commiserating with people while fixing their problem. Allows people to vent and we all know the need to vent when tech isn't cooperating.
>>"I don't feel like the engineer listened to me before he solved my problem."
I worked in tech support in the mid 2000s. The crazy thing was the agent ratings were a delicate balance between customer ratings, resolve rate and call duration.
While its true some people just want to be heard, its also true some people just want their problem solved quickly.
The most common problem with advice is that people give it before what they understand the real problem.
If someone tells you their car is broken, it's not helpful to tell them that they should get it fixed, because maybe the REAL problem is they don't have the money for it and are ashamed to tell you. (And maybe the solution to that is more complicated than you think, too.)
For advice to be remotely useful, you have to first put in the time to understand the real problem. It requires a lot of patience and requires you suspend judgment. If you're not willing to do that, then don't give advice!
This reminds me of my inlaws telling me their car's engine needed finetuning but they did not have the money to spend at it. After a month or so the car's engine broke down 'suddenly' in a total loss fashion. Somehow they managed to buy another car.
I never understood the ways of their prioritization schemes and probably never will. PS of course I gave them the obvious advice. It feels that even though they never buy new cars like I do, they still manage to spend more money on cars then I do.
> If someone tells you their car is broken, it's not helpful to tell them that they should get it fixed, because maybe the REAL problem is they don't have the money for it and are ashamed to tell you. (And maybe the solution to that is more complicated than you think, too.)
Maybe they feel that skipping the social event you're pushing because their car is broken is more socially acceptable than skipping because they, er, really need to shampoo their cat that evening.
This is important to me. Especially when I become a senior, my opinion without much thought can be taken as a criticism and make others irritated or insecure.
Also this is what all advice sounds like to new parents. If you want to be an ally to someone who's just had a baby, don't give unsolicited advice - they're hearing enough of it from the numerous people who want to talk all about "future problems you definitely need to avoid now" to someone who hasn't had more then 2 hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Does that really happen? In my experience parents giving advice to other parents generally sound like “I don’t really know what I’m doing, nor your child, but this worked for us.”
The wild variety of advice is a good indication there is no true answer.
I'm not a parent so I can't say for sure but I've listened to lots of my child-having friends complain about the older members of their family constantly giving "advice" that is actually just veiled defensiveness and projection.
It sounds good, but often still might be wrong. "That situation" includes details that still might not be clear. It's hard to communicate an entire frame of mind, and you might find that you'd in fact do something very different if you were confronted with it.
Telling someone what you'd do in that situation is also another way of sussing out context they haven't told you yet. As an extremely simplified example:
"I'd probably remove that piece right there first. It doesn't appear to fit with the rest."
"That piece is holding together this whole subsystem, I'm not going to remove it."
I often find myself taking this approach, but it’s still manipulative because it’s just me masking the fact that I’m really just trying to tell them what to do.
Depends on your motives, people would absolutely call it manipulative if your motives were to make their lives worse to benefit yourself. Advice aren't always good for people.
> if your motives were to make their lives worse to benefit yourself
I guess I made an assumption that wasn't the case. Most people that have malign intentions aren't curious about these topics enough to discuss them openly.
"persuasion" gets a bad rap because most people assume you are persuading someone from a good place to bad. The opposite occurs often as well.
> "persuasion" gets a bad rap because most people assume you are persuading someone from a good place to bad. The opposite occurs often as well.
Persuasion can be questionable even if it's not malicious.
People can persuade others for selfish reasons, or to push their own desires, without it necessarily making the other person worse. But few of us like the feeling of being persuaded for someone else's benefit regardless.
Or, more relevantly in the context of advice, some people often like to give advice or push ideas that they themselves like, or with which they have good experiences, or which suit their thinking and personality. But the idea might be unsuited to the other person's situation, needs, desires or personality. Persuasion tactics or social tricks don't make that better, even if the motive isn't malicious.
A therapist needs to persuade a troubled person to change their behavior and mindset. I don't know why you keep focusing on the malign example, everything on earth has good and bad application.
There is a big difference between giving advice and giving orders.
If you are (e.g.) someone's manager, and you need them to do X, then you should say that. There is nothing worse than being unsure if something is a suggestion or a mandatory "suggestion".
It is not manipulative if you actually mean it that way. People get insulted over others not taking their advice, reacting with "I told you so" or repeating it and trying to force others.
Meanwhile, those who are just saying what they would do are not invested into what other person will do, they state what they would do and move on.
It is not just phrasing, it is also mindset that shows up in your other interactions.
I abide by these principles precisely. Didn’t always. I have a couple extras.
6. On the rare chance I offer advice without being asked, I always frame it as “here’s what I learned the hard way. Do you mind if I tell you how I screwed up in a similar situation?”
7. And then I hasten to tell the other party I won’t be offended if they ignore what I said. Unless it’s the fact that Scarlett Johansson deserved a much much better script for the Black Widow movie and deserves a Mulligan, which is an undeniable fact.
Mostly though I just listen because people almost never actually want advice, but they’re often in need of a good listener.
ODD has some really questionable aspects. Especially considering half of children diagnosed with it are also ADHD. I highly suspect the issue is more with the authority figures not knowing how to handle neurodivergence than the children themselves.
Many people tend to do the opposite of what they are told to do. In an individualist culture, this is normal.
A step back - I’d consider the possibility too that it’s a learned behavior where they have received enough pain in the past doing what they were told, so literally have been conditioned to do the opposite of what they were told.
And/or, never got attention or positive feedback when doing what they were told - but got lots of attention when they did what they were told not to do. Not necessarily positive, but something is better than nothing.
Which isn’t necessarily at odds with what you’re saying.
As someone who has some of the traits this is absolutely it.
When you spend your childhood being told by people to do things that will lead to, well, almost certainly being poor and having a shit life, you learn to just ignore advice and do the opposite.
It is really hard to unlearn this in adulthood. I tend to get by by judging the person giving the advice e.g. if they seem successful then they are more likely to be correct than if they are not.
I developed something like this, but it manifests more as "question everything until it makes sense to me."
I feel like I'm constitutionally incapable of taking anybody's word for anything, but it's vastly worse for anyone who reacts with hostility to my questions about points that don't make sense to me.
It was very much trained into me by my father that following the advice of those people leads to suffering and pain. He acted like he knew everything. He reacted with rage when questioned. And looking back on it, he was (and remains) wrong about every single point of substance I ever remember his having made.
> manifests more as "question everything until it makes sense to me."
This is called "critical thinking" -- at least when combined with a decent amount of existing topical knowledge to be able to ask good questions -- and is rather useful for all sorts of things.
It's surprising and disappointing how rarely it goes over well. It's led me to believe most people deserve to feel "impostor syndrome."
One of my favorite feelings is the one I get when I have an opportunity to change my mind because someone has better information about a topic than I do and is willing to share it with me so I can come to the same conclusion they have, rather than the one I had because I was ignorant of certain information.
I always hope professionals, whom I expect to be experts in their subjects, enjoy their subject enough that they are better informed than I am about it, so I tend to ask a lot of questions. It is extremely rare that I find one who takes this well.
My mechanic is a glowing exception on this front. He actually specializes in my kind of car (old Priuses, not something fancy), and when he tells me X, Y, and/or Z are wrong with it and what he needs to do to fix it, if I ask questions, he can easily identify what knowledge I'm missing, and happily just explains it to me. As an intelligent, curious person, I love interacting with experts like this and will happily pay more to do so. And he seems to enjoy talking about his subject, even with someone who knows a lot less about it than he does.
But my doctors? Especially "specialists"? Absolutely opposite experience on every front. They loathe my questions, and treat me with contempt for daring to question their authority, even when I'm trying to ask about recent research papers and have previously read all their citations. I'm not a doctor, but I do know how to read papers, and especially for a chronic condition I have, I've read a lot. I'm not some random person coming in with a file of advice from "Doctor Google." If anything, I know quite a bit more about my condition than I do about my car, even though my history with each is about the same length.
I don't know if it has to do with the respective systems the two kinds of experts operate in or what (my mechanic's education was not as long or as arduous, and since he operates independently, it's up to him to decide how much time he wants to spend with me and what to charge me), but it's a disappointing world for an inquisitive critical thinker.
The worst is when I decide for myself to do something, and then someone suggests the same course of action right as I'm about to do it. Well, now I don't want to.
It's a balance. Sometimes people ARE looking for advice, but do not present it that way. So if you don't provide your input, you come across as an a**le. Figuring out whether that's the case can be tricky based on your relationship with the person.
That's an extreme and catastrophizing take. There is often hidden feedback buried in most criticism. Feedback is gold. Take it all with a grain of salt but don't be so arrogant as to discount unsolicited feedback entirely.
It sounds like the author is coming from a places of intellect and might be missing more of the emotional reasons people don't follow advice.
Intellectual-emotional dissonance is one of the biggest reasons people don't do things they know they should[1] be doing. We often have the mistaken approach that if we pile on more intellectual reasons why we should take the advice that the logic will outweigh our emotions and we will take the advice. But this isn't true at all.
Piling on more intellectual reasons creates a bigger gap between emotions and reason making the situation feel even more distressing. It's usually much more effective to find a way to help people's emotional sides keep up with their intellect, but we often devalue emotions so much that we even devalue approaching them at all even if it's to ameliorate them.
How to do this, is another comment for another time, but it's rewarding, as it helps us understand more about what makes us tick.
Imagine a patch of ice on a busy sidewalk. You can put up a sign that says "be careful, icy path" but lots of people are still going to slip and fall. The advice (ie the sign) can only do so much as long as the hazard exists. The challenge here is the hazards are your mental models so they are a lot harder to clear than an icy patch.
Yep, and almost everyone thinks their mental models accurately reflect reality. If they didn't, surely they would change their model, right? ;) Sometimes, even, folk's mental models become so important they try to force reality to conform to them, often with disastrous results.
I've never been convinced of the idea that emotions and intellect have a gulf between them like this.
I'm more of the opinion that when something like that happens, it is usually due to misunderstanding the underlying problem, and all the intellectual reasons are simply trying to address the wrong reasons and thus are ineffective.
Very Right. I have come to the conclusion that it is mostly Emotions/Feelings over Intellect/Rationality though they are interlinked together. To suppress the former and give free reign to the latter takes a lot of self-control which can easily crumble when the right buttons (sometimes unknowingly) get pushed. One way to control this is to minimize all externalities which could trigger an emotional response eg. it is easier to have a rational conversation via simple text (various modes) vs. face-to-face where tonal/non-verbal cues can trigger unwarranted emotional responses derailing from the subject at hand; Biology, Psychology, Operant Conditioning etc. are all relevant here.
Emotions/Feelings are fundamental to existence itself i.e. they are the drivers for everything else. There is a lot of fascinating research/understanding going on in this domain which is worth studying. You might find the following two books interesting;
1) The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux.
2) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Step 0 I think should be "maybe don't give advice". You want to help, you think you're really good, you think it will improve things, but that's not how other people see it. They may seem like they need advice or seem like they are asking for it between the lines, but they just really want to unload or chit chat, or share some difficulty. The answer to that is sometimes to listen and not give advice.
Yes, if someone asks for it, and they seem like they really are interested in it, by all means, give it to them. But in many cases, spraying advice around can be frustrating for both the givers and the (often unwilling) receivers of it.
Will second that many times. As a fairly proactive guy who almost never leaves any loose ends in his relationships, I overdid giving the advice and some people started avoiding me. I was bitter about it until I realized they did not want their problem fixed, they sought sympathy.
Nothing wrong with that, it's just that my mind immediately jumps to potential solutions.
But I was severely humbled on that front after I have allowed a super dark period in my life (7-8 years, still ongoing but is now being actively attacked and positive signs are starting to get visible). I began to understand that there are also situations where you can't do almost anything but you still need a kind word.
So I started giving that and only vaguely hinting at the potential of an advice (so subtle that most people missed it which I am very okay with) and lo and behold, the new people in my life love chatting with me.
We have a saying in our country: "You can't force-feed wisdom and shove it down people's throats like you would do for a sick person who still needs food".
> until I realized they did not want their problem fixed, they sought sympathy.
That goes both ways, as many of the people I've run into who just want sympathy, can bring a lot of stress on the listeners. E.g. I can't take hearing complaints about abusive partners, etc so that they feel a little better for the moment, then they march right back to them.
Growing up with a serious complainer caused me to instinctively try and fix issues, and to avoid if you don't want that type of help.
Absolutely. No one can listen or provide sympathy indefinitely. Trying to is a short path to burnout. Almost everyone could benefit from being listened to, but I have to remember, it doesn't always have to be me
Quite true. I am not advocating for "always listen" and even if that brands me as a monster I very often do NOT advocate for "always be kind" -- there are many people whose problems I have zero patience for.
My bigger point was that if you consciously chose to sit or take a walk with that person and if you truly care then you should make sure they feel listened to and understood before giving advice -- if you give advice at all.
This presupposes that you care about that person which I'll immediately agree is not a given for most people you'll ever meet.
This is spot on. I took a few counseling courses in college, and the thing I remember most was that we were instructed to never give advice. Ask questions, get clarifications, repeat back information, but don't say "Here's what I would do.."
In many ways it was similar to rubber duck debugging, as the goal seemed to be to facilitate the person being counseled on finding the solution on their own by seeing the problem with fresh eyes.
Im on the opposite end. I wish people gave more unsolicited advice, or at least asked if I wanted it. I look around and think there is a dearth of advice and opinions. People are so cautious about giving subjective feedback that they dont offer it at all, leading to detriment.
I think advice is an important part of a community and a support network, and am exceedingly grateful to those who have offered it to me.
Nine times out of ten, people want to give advice to either 1) to feel cleverer than the person receiving it or 2) get them to stop talking about their problems.
If you're struggling with a problem, do you usually need someone to act smarter than you or tell you to be quiet?
I was at a bakery grand opening from an uneducated rural family.
Plenty of their rural friends listened to the difficulties, wished them the best.
Bring in the MBA + Industrial Engineer, and tell them some advice on processes, economics, and as a bonus, I was an Electrical Engineer for a few years so I had some advice on their oven problem.
What is better? The person that says "You look beautiful", or "You have a piece of fuzz in your hair?"
If someone just needs the emotional energy to get back into the fight then a compliment is often what is needed.
If someone is about to do something imminently that you see a correctable fault with and they don't then pointing it out is likely correct.
So many people up here thinking there is always 1 exactly right course of action! Why?! Why do so many otherwise smart people fall back to the silliest of binary thinking and heuristics?
> So many people up here thinking there is always 1 exactly right course of action! Why?! Why do so many otherwise smart people fall back to the silliest of binary thinking and heuristics?
I was one of those. I know the answer: I wasn't/I'm not that intelligent. I learnt that being technically right is not as important as I thought (and I also learnt to care less about it specially when I'm surrounded by other technical people).
Reflection is a form of intelligence. Being able to acknowledge you were once wrong is not a skill everyone has (and being technically correct is a super important part of being smart at least in tech). I hope you see how smart you are and keep getting smarter.
> I learnt that being technically right is not as important as I thought
Only in discussions, whenever you do anything being right is the most important thing as doing the wrong thing is just contra productive, being right saves a massive amount of time and work.
I think there’s a difference between being right and being technically right (I wrote about the latter). For example, being technically right could mean not to lend money to your best friend because you have historical proof that the money will be lost and you won’t get paid back. Being right in this scenario means: give that money to your best pal because that’s what best friend are for. I could be getting this wrong, though (bear with me).
I don’t want to be technically right 100% of the time (it’s hard for me because of my background, I tend to think in analytical terms first, and in humane terms second). Obviously this doesn’t apply to every scenario, but I think the audience gets the idea: there are people out there (me in the past) that go 100% of the time the “technically right” way, no matter what and you cannot convince them of doing the opposite because they can prove it to you that they are “right”
> Only in discussions, whenever you do anything being right is the most important thing as doing the wrong thing is just contra productive, being right saves a massive amount of time and work.
Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes doing it the way people expect will be better for future maintenance. Sometimes doing it the way that makes your boss look good will be better for you. All interesting decisions are close and uncertain.
Careful to not get sucked into a binary trap. Most (but not all) problems exist on a gradient you can often be "right enough", "fast enough", and as uncomfortable as it seems we can be "correct enough" or even "coherent enough" to succeed.
>So many people up here thinking there is always 1 exactly right course of action! Why?! Why do so many otherwise smart people fall back to the silliest of binary thinking and heuristics?
Thank you for sharing! Based on your last sentence I think we're in agreement that it's probably not great to give someone unsolicited advice (but it's fine if we disagree). I wanted to throw out a couple more thoughts:
I think that having experience in the business (or not) is important. I think that sometimes giving advice on an area that one doesn't have experience in can be a weird way to put oneself in a 'one up' position. Kind of a "Look, I don't even do your job, but let me tell you how to do it better" kind of statement.
I'm not saying that this was your intention or your effect but I think it's something engineers are prone to - I know I've done this. Wasn't there even a name for this? Something about "dinner party advice"? If this rings a bell for anyone I'd appreciate the help about this.
Sometimes I've found that if I have experience in the area I can suggest a small change with a substantial benefit (because I've actually done this enough times to know that the advice will actually help, actually) but even there I'd be really hesitant to offer unsolicited advice.
And, as an added bonus, consider that they may have already committed to what they're doing. In which case, even if you're right, you're basically telling them that they've done something wrong - maybe they can fix it (with more effort and/or money) maybe they can't, but that's gotta be an extra burden for them.
I've heard it called engineer's syndrome. "You start believing that since you're an excellent engineer in one specialty, then you're a friggin' genius in everything you do, because it's all the same, really" [0]
It apparently affects physicists too, and must be common enough to warrant two xkcds. [1][2]
these people are boring, words spent talking about nothing is akin to throwing fresh food away, I'm not a psychologist and I have my own problems, why should I have to listen to others drone on about nothing when we could be working together to fix either or both of our issues.
Because much of the time you just haven't realized yet that you don't really know shit about shit, and good friends communicate in a variety of different ways about different subjects, sometimes just listening, sometimes actually helping someone with an issue they've asked for help with. Lack of versatility in that area means one will probably struggle to form more than the most superficial of relationships, because ironically it ends up being more shallow to think you're in a position to do something more impactful than offering your time to listen.
It's like coming onto a new team as a junior software dev thinking you'll introduce whatever hot new build tool or refactor the code that sucks that someone wrote 15 years ago, and then getting fired because you're clueless.
My wife basically never gives people feedback unless its positive. She is a people pleaser, popular, all that stuff. No one asks her for advice.
I am much more controversial. I have to ignore emails and text messages of people asking for advice because it happens too much. (I'm busy with my own life, the people asking for advice are low-mid tier and wont follow it, people are asking for my expertise for free)
I've actually hired other people to be a second brain because my wife cannot give negative feedback.
Instead of giving advice, you may show her what these things do to people, and ask her if that's what she wants in her life. Also show her what hard work, focus and dedication does to successful people.
I've had a few experiences where someone asked for advice, and I shared something very earnestly, come to find out much later that the part of the advice that really stuck with them was some extraneous point of mine that was completely tangential to what I was being so earnest about.
I've also had a few experiences where someone gave me repeated advice that I rejected several times previous, until it finally "clicked" once.
I think the processing of advice is a communication; it takes two. The giver has to try, and the receiver has to be in a state that is receptive to hearing it. Neither side has full control. So overall, I think it's good to just keep trying, knowing that it'll only break through sometimes.
The article touches on this too, from personal experience it seems like the likelihood of someone taking advice depends on both sides:
- How good is the advice? specific > generic, personalized > general, actionable > not actionable, objective > biased etc, from someone knowledgeable > random person with no specific knowledge / expertise in the subject.
- How receptive is the person receiving the advise? Was the advise unsolicited? Did the person ask because they want to confirm what they already think or are they actually looking for advise they can consider? Do they trust the person (both in intent and knowledge)?
Ironically some times the advise I ignore the most are from those that are closest to me. Family, close friends etc. I know they have my best interest at heart and they might be knowledgeable about the subject and know me so have an understanding of what I want / don't want. But they're biased, so the advise tend to be tainted.
I've always laughed at tony robbins giving advice to 40k people in a stadium all at once. Unless it's "make you bed in the morning" level generality, it can't possibly apply to everyone at once. You need to know who you are talking to first before you can give them real advice.
Robbins would likely laugh at your comment for getting him completely arse backwards.
He's not there to preach to the many, well, not yet at least, he's there for the fewer to self select out and come forward to next level grooming.
The Race Track advice grift works by giving 100 prospects each one of ten horses as a sure bet; at the end of a ten horse race 10 punters come forward wanting more advice, each convinced they've now got inside information on the next sure thing.
Robbins isn't far removed, his purpose is to gather a group of the gullible who will all pay for the most insipid generic advice deliverable and select a core of true beleivers from that group who will invest even more than just the books.
He's not there to give "real advice", he's there to make bank.
I guess this is entirely tangential, but one of the stories in here resonated with me.
I had much in common with a childhood friend. We bonded over similar interests in electronics, then video games, then computers in elementary school. He was definitely smarter than me when he could motivate himself to learn things. But in retrospect, I had dogged persistence on my side. As we moved past high school, I went into the military but kept my computer interests while he went to an art school and sort of floundered for a number of years. Getting into and out of minimum wage jobs and various MLM schemes. After I got out of the military and starting my first IT job, I tried to convince him a few times that he would be awesome at the same things I was doing at the time and would make a lot more money than he was at the time. But I guess it just wasn't what he wanted.
Fast forward a decade or two and he now owns a very successful potato-chip distributing business where he lives and bootstrapped a second side-business doing video drone photography for real estate listings. I think we make about the same amount of money, except he doesn't have a desk job, gets many more vacations, and doesn't have to sit through multiple hours of meetings a day.
So it seems he turned out alright for him despite not taking my advice. (Or possibly anyone else's!)
Going to an art school sounds very hard, because the measure of success is very erratic, so you can never congratulate yourself or hold yourself to a plan. Maybe he has as much grit as anyone and such studies aren’t good for motivation.
"Move your feet up" is a cue. It's shorthand for something much more complicated that you've already learned and need to be reminded to apply in the moment.
When squatting, someone might tell you to "drive from the hips" or "knees out." When singing, someone might advise "diaphragm!" When coding, "DRY!" The obvious interpretation of these things don't stand on their own.
Yea this is a good point. Same with "lean forward" during skiing. It's only really helpful for someone who already knows why you need to lean forward (and is able to do so) but just had a momentary lapse.
It's not about your lived experience, but it has to be some lived experience that's felt viscerally. It can be your own, it can be in 2nd second person. It's about the feeling it drives. Not so much the frame/POV.
Good advice is visceral, limited, targeted and helps get the person to the immediate next 'better' state.
In military parlance, it's what helps you complete 1 single ooda loop. In ML parlance it's what helps complete 1 gradient update.
Big picture advice only works if the person has already built trust with associated mini-advice over many steps. In ML parlance, you can't increase the learning rate until you have high confidence in the direction of the gradient.
The flip side to that is we are terrible archivists of our own lived experiences. We constantly editorialize them in order to spare our egos and minds the inconvenient facts of our actual path through life. These never get communicated with the advice and so most advice ends up really being self serving fairy tales of a time that never existed.
I never give advice. I'll explain similar situations I was in before, what I did, why I did it, and _critically_ what I think I could have done to avoided the effort or to have had a better outcome if I had a second chance at the problem.
You can give perspectives. What people do with those is up to them.
I tell my kids this - you can tell people till you're blue in the face that there's an alligator in the river, and a surprising number of people will ignore you until they themselves see an alligator in the river.
It's just how people are. It is very hard to learn from other people's mistakes.
After verifying that the person isn't just venting and looking for empathy, I'll put in my plug for learning about the transtheoretical model of change [1]. Step one is determining whether the person even sees a problem. If they don't, you can ask questions about what would things look like if there was a problem. But there is no point in giving advice until the preparation or action stages. Before that your best avenue is asking the right questions (see motivational interviewing [2]).
I wonder if the problem is that, when you give someone advice, you're not giving them the whole thought-structure you've built that strongly implies the advice - you're just giving them the result. So they don't have any of the ideas that support the advice, just a blind aphorism.
Maybe it would help to only give advice in long discussions where you show someone all the structure under the advice and then poke at it together to see where the weak spots are.
This is a theory of mine for which I haven't specifically looked into evidence, so take it with a grain of salt - but I'm convinced that this is why storytelling exists, and specifically why the Hero's journey is so common: stories are essentially beneficial viruses. They exploit our innate desire for discovery by packaging the information into a format that is interesting in the moment, and because we see someone else learning the lesson we are meant to learn, we feel as if we've discovered it ourselves.
This would also neatly explain why we discovered storytelling in the first place, and why so many story elements have changed little over thousands of years - stories "evolved" with us to become more and more effective at inoculating us against dangers which we can survive through our intellect.
> I wonder if the problem is that, when you give someone advice, you're not giving them the whole thought-structure you've built that strongly implies the advice - you're just giving them the result. So they don't have any of the ideas that support the advice, just a blind aphorism.
I'm skeptical. My observation is that it's the messenger that is ignored. Ignoring the advice is simply a side-effect of this.
Consider how many people pay therapists many thousands of dollars to simply hear what their spouse was telling them for years.
Seriously, this was like the biggest epiphany I had out of my 20s. The way to convince anyone of anything isn’t to beat them over the head into submission. It’s to drop the idea off casually, let them ignore it for a while, and watch them slowly come around to this strange idea sitting around that actually seems to work…
The way i've heard this described is "place your truth, gently, next to theirs". Then walk away. No pressure, no sales, nothing. That's the only way it can be adopted.
In that, it's not that the person hasn't heard the arguments before, it's that they haven't met the right person to say it to them. Often, that person is in the mirror.
- If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money.
Do you think people consider recommendation systems (feeds which inform their worldview) to be a part of natural order of things so they don't suspect it. Even if they know it to be algorithmic, nudges can be inserted at appropriate times when our guards are down.
absolutely, but I consider that as the "environment" of cultural evolution so to say
meaning as we collectively get used to a technology we figure these kinds of things out, and even become desensitised to them.
of course people got taken by surprise at first (e.g. first trump campaign's use of those kinds of manipulations over recommendation feeds) but culture (youths and other children) do adapt and react to the "environment" or landscape
This is one of the ways people can go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. They think they "discovered for themselves" some secret truth that "the elite" or "the experts" don't want them to know. Then they find a community of similarly-awakened people who lower their guards even more and point them to other "alternative truths" that they can go DiscoverForThemselves™ too.
Probably the same psychology behind those obnoxious AI-generated ads that say things like "Here's the secret about gut bacteria that doctors don't want you to know!"
This is exactly the reason QAnon took off. It evolved from ARG-ish games without the goal of being persuasive about real-world things. But a participant back then realized how people enjoyed figuring out the 'puzzle', and how to lead them to the conclusion without telling them, and once you add political agendas we got what we have today.
Clicking on the thread I expected this to be the top comment because of how low effort and high brow it is (comments write themselves around pop topics, I find). You can go so far as to skip reading the article. But there is no real way to verify it. It sounds good and gives whoever says it a sense of smugness (“pretty simple, and timeless”), but that’s about it. The person saying it has no idea either way.
Maybe that ending question of "why won't you do obvious-thing-that-solves-the-problem?" is the best thing in the entire article. But only if you ask it literally, without irony.
My guess is that each time somebody ignores a good advice, they do it for different reasons. So discovering the reason is the most impactful thing you can do.
> discovering the reason is the most impactful thing you can do
Most people do this by trying to give you more advice once they think they understand your problem, often before you finished explaining.
Being bipolar, I deal with this this all the time. It would be funny if it wasn't so frustrating. It would be a lot easier if people simply took my limitations for granted instead of making me explain until they realize they have no useful advice.
I think that can work if they really are convinced you're not going to judge them for it. I have friends I can ask such a question; if I'm asking more distant friends or acquaintances then I'm going to make it really clear that I want to know and not use it as a springboard for expressing my own opinion.
Old geezer angles: There's a long and winding road between "they followed your advice right away" and "giving them advice had no effect". Your advice, or some of it, could become their Plan B. Or something that they try a time or few in the future. Or something they pass on to a third person. Or a memory of your own preferences. Or part of how they start behaving when they're in a different situation, or getting up toward your age. Or an anecdote when they're speaking at your memorial.
And the tone and perspective of your advice counts for at least as much as the advice itself.
ADDED: How you react to people following, or not following, your advice is part of that "tone and perspective" stuff.
I’d be wary of following almost any romantic advice out there. People who are best qualified to give advice tend to give the least cause they know how little use there is in advice. This creates a scenario where the least useful advice is the most plenty because those with experience know that advice is useless.
So many people have had the luxury of being physically attractive, in the right place at the right time, an upbringing that got them into social circles that would match them properly, a work environment that has potential partners, or having the fortune of being in a college where they could meet their partner. So many of these types of individuals will act as if romance is effortless because it really was for them. They never needed to do anything because life worked out that way just due to sheer luck. These types of individuals will be completely useless for dating advice (but will make up the majority of advice giving) because they’ve never struggled for a moment and never had to think about what they’re doing right/wrong.
For giving good advice, I’d say the answer is don’t give advice.
It’s very rare to enjoy such a massive experience and information advantage that you can say “be the sword”, at just the right moment, to grant someone enlightenment.
Good “advice” is work - you solve a problem.
If you want to help, engage in problem solving. Which is miles better than giving good advice.
Most people are able to solve their own problems.
Heck - how many times have you sought advice only to be told something you already knew?
Most of the time ?
Generally, people need
space/ time to think, resources, or to learn something about the world/ themselves.
Even what I’m saying isn’t new to you. At most it’s formulated in a different order or style, but it’s not new.
——-
If asked a question, a common response from me would be:
“this is the answer based on what you said, but it seems it would be obvious/ I suspect you have considered it. Am I missing something ?”
Typically the answer is “yes” and then I get better information.
If the answer is no, then I check why something obvious was missed.
——
NB : Problem solving means actually solving things, not throwing your hands up when someone doesn’t ‘follow your solution’.
A workable solution - works.
Good engineering considers the real world limits of the participants.
Everyone wants to be healthier - it’s finding the motivation, time, type of exercise, and the rest that matter.
And thats work. You may have to search, come up with ideas, or bring some relevant experience and memories to bear.
> If asked a question, a common response from me would be:“this is the answer based on what you said, but it seems it would be obvious/ I suspect you have considered it. Am I missing something ?"
Yes. One of the big reasons I got into direct response marketing (surprisingly) is that I'm obsessed with the truth. Why do people really make decisions? What are the actual levers that get people to take action? In DR marketing, you either figure this out or go out of business.
I'm really good at getting people to put advice into action in real life because of my marketing experience. I've helped multiple friends get jobs or change their lives. But I only give advice if I really think it's going to be impactful, so it's rare.
The biggest impact on whether your advice will be taken (or your ad will work) is giving specific examples rather than platitudes.
Also, obligatory Tolkien:
"Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. But what would you? You have not told me all concerning yourself; and how then shall I choose better than you?"
I think this misses a really important political dimension to advice. Sometimes people tell you to do things they want you to do for their reasons, instead of what's in your best interest. It can be really hard to tell when that is happening sometimes. I find my advice is dropped most often when I present it analytically, like people believe there's some hidden motive that's not worth searching for. I get way more engagement by presenting the same advice as charismatically as possible, with simple justification and a big smile.
I've given a bunch of advice in my life, some was useful, some missed the mark, and over time after learning to listen to people, I think I've gotten reasonably good at it.
And that's why I'd add to everything that's been said another pattern on why people don't listen to my advice: because I'm not rich.
Instead of considering that some knowledge is domain-specific, I've seen a trend in people valuing halo-style anything said by someone that's much more financially successful then them, regardless if this matters with the problem at hand. I'm not sure if this is something that's increased recently, just my anecdotal observation.
>If people have a good “user experience” when they interact with you, then they will want to interact with you more in the future.
I really liked this particular framing.
Of course that’s because it concisely states what I’m already struggling to accomplish in a conversation, and the types of people I end up seeking or avoiding. It’s obviously not going to stop a willful asshole from doing what they do, they know their user experience is bad, and they enjoy it that way.
Another useful thing I eventually discovered that sticks with me is “Not all conversion is information exchange”.
A lot of the times when people talk, rather than wanting “facts or fixes”, what they are instead seeking to accomplish is to share, regulate or calibrate their emotions with other people. Smalltalk isn’t about the content (which will be forgotten), it’s about social bonding and a way of saying to someone “you matter enough to be with”. What they will remember is how they felt around you. For those like myself with some degree of alexithymia, it can be surprising just how much of an important factor emotions can play in the daily experience of other people.
In my experience, when people ignore good advice, it seems like there's always a "z" factor keeping people off the line of advice and onto something else: waiting for another moment, or a desire for a different outcome, or a notion that there's something else that will reveal itself or alter the given path.
The challenge is finding/honoring the critical moment when the action in the advice has to be taken or a new set of circumstances establish themselves and the advice needs to be updated.
When I was leaving for America, my aunt pulled me aside and had a serious talk with me. "Be very careful," she ended. My thoughts? She was jealous that I was going to America and not her kids. I had just turned 18.
But then, I found myself depressed, disappointed, and betrayed in the US. I thought of her advice. "Be very careful." I knew i needed to be careful, I wanted to be careful. But what does being careful means?
She was right about what my life would turn into. Two decades later, my entire experience into the US boils down to Be Careful. It's not bad advice, but you have to unpack it. It's a zip file that only time and experience can decompress.
Such a surprising number of people saying to never give advice, starting to question my assumed role of mentor a bit. Coming from a professional standpoint, at work, as a software engineer. When you have what you think is relative experience, and think you have a nugget of advice that could help a more junior person out, who you are pretty sure is looking up to you for advice, do you just not give it? I don’t mean in a prescriptive manner, more like “hey I see the road you are on, I have been there, here are some pointers that I think could be of use”. I thought I was careful to always flavor such advice as non-prescriptive— it’s not me saying “do this, otherwise you will fail”, it’s more “here are some interesting ways that I myself have failed in the past”. Maybe I’m wrong? In some cases it’s been months/years working with people in a mentorship role, and I swear I have seen nuggets of my advice turn up later as “yeah I see no issues with this, carry on and good job!!”. The article isn’t about technical advice, but it’s here on the front page of HN so I can’t help but interpret it in that way. I know I’ll be wrong sometimes, because I have been, but I don’t see it as a failure, I am very transparent about how I was wrong, and try to turn into a learning experience for us all.
The article is talking in very broad terms. As is everyone else.
Things are quite different if you're in a professional environment or a mentor role. Advice is generally expected, even if it's not fully appreciated.
Other examples include support groups and various communities around a craft. If you join a group of writers and start a discussion, "advice" will likely happen.
Something I've come to realize is when someone gives advice, especially career related, it's usually directed at a young version of themselves rather than to anyone else. The motivation, even in subconscious, is usually therapeutic from the standpoint of the advice-giver rather than helpful to the advice-receiver. It doesn't mean that it can't still be helpful, but it should be understood in that light.
Wow! This is something that's been rolling about in my brain but the author has elucidated it in a way beyond the thought and attention I gave this.
Anecdotally, I have seen and `read` multiple founders' posts and comments detailing the mistakes they have made, year after year, month after month.. and I went and made most of the mistakes all over again. I still see others follow the same path.. But why don't we apply the advice we read so often and makes so much sense?
I believe while the reading the articles, the advice resonates and makes sense but when we go into real world, it gets messy.. It is harder to notice the patterns. But one thing is true, when we do make those mistakes, we can then hark back to that advice and realize the wisdom in them. Atleast after that, it gets easier to not fall into those traps again and the advice is internalized.
So, what is the use of writing about your hard-learned advice, you ask?
1. We start noticing the patterns earlier thanks to the memory of the advice humming there at the back of your mind and so the learning is faster.
2. It gives one courage and confidence to get up, dust oneself off and try again, cause others have done that before me or you.
I only take advice from people that are successful in that domain (sometimes people that suck at something still give advice on it), and are similar to me (I don't want exercise advice from my grandmother)
Even when I'm giving advice on a domain that I'm successful in, to a person that's similar to me, they rarely take it, so I've stopped giving it
What if your grandmother was fit and knows what she's talking about? Just because someone isn't currently successful doesn’t mean they weren't successful in the past.
Many experts have differing opinions (especially in the expertise space). It also depends on how you define experts. Just being successful in the domain could be a result of luck.
Advice is useless. You don't have the context, or theories (see programming/everything as theory building) to make a good decision for someone else.
The only thing that works is sharing truth. When you don't know what else to do except share advice, make sure you spend a lot of time explaining the truths behind it.
People that 'give' advice will most likely take no part in the implementation of the 'advice', so they get zero blowback for being wrong or advising the wrong thing, and wouldn't think twice before giving it. (no skin in the game)
Worst of all, most advice is given unprompted and is somebody just expanding his ego with his own bullshit.
Advice is not in short supply. And I don't want to hear it (barring few rare exceptions)
I can't recall the last time I had gotten good advice, other than unprompted criticism and naysayer sentiments.
And the only good advice I've ever gotten is from people that I have gone out of my way and reached out to because of their demonstrated and undeniable expertise on whatever the subject might be.
I was waiting for this angle. In my experience, at this point in my life, I've come to entertain the idea that humans are similar only on a surface level. We're genetically made of the same stuff, but our values, biases, even the basic axioms upon which each of us operates are vastly different. I've often felt that most people waste too many words to transfer a concept from their head into the heads of other people, preferring instead an abrupt, dry communication style to save time and energy and working off of the assumption that there's a vast, common emotional and intellectual knowledge base between humans. But I'm wrong and they're right. Use many words. Communicating ideas between humans is a craft and an art form. It's really difficult.
Most people, in my experience, not only do not think logically but actively eschew thinking logically, making long term plans, goal setting, etc.
I don't know if it's an intelligence thing. I don't think it is. I have met not so smart people that are incredibly goal oriented and very smart people who piss it all away.
I'm at a point in my career/life where I often find myself giving advice to people who aren't interested in it. I've learned to limit the extent of the advice I give until people show that they know how to take advice. There are also likely strategies for giving advice depending on who you are talking to. I find that, especially for my spouse, direct advice is useless (...and that's when the fight started) but winding parables and directed self-learning are incredibly impactful.
I generally do ignore advice, unless i ask for one, like when i have a problem or when i feel
helpless. I just leave people alone and expect the same from them. Everyone is on their own journey, i do not know about theirs and they do not know about mine. Mostly people give under-complex advice, that do not take my situation into account. It always feels out-of-touch. But that is just me.
Advice we learn from we only hear once, advice that doesn't help us you hear over and over so it is easier to remember. So likely you just don't remember all the advice that helped you as you only needed to hear it once.
Ha. I have a very conversational thought process. Often times, giving my wife direct advice would give her anxiety or make her feel like I was giving her directions, rather than direction. "Maybe you should..." would be heard as "I want you to..."
I've found that providing access to unopinionated information ("Here's a study related to that thing you are worried about"), bringing attention/space to the problem (without creating stress), or encouraging her to speak with friends who have had similar issues who I know will give her good advice will help her come to her own conclusions, at which point she will come to me and discuss her findings and the direction she wants to go in.
No offence to your wife, but I find it incredibly exhausting to speak to people like this.
I agree that unsolicited advice is not good. But one should make exceptions for advice from spouses, who's vowed to be by your side, and who has your general best interests at heart - no matter how direct the advice is.
This seems more like a "it's not what you say, it's how you say it" kind of scenario, which is pointless sugarcoating (especially when you have a problem to solve, so you should be willing to listen to advice or take direct instructions if you yourself don't know how to solve it).
It makes a lot of sense, to me. The internet is full of "How do I lose weight", take "Ask Reddit", it's at least once a month that there's a "People who lost weight, how did you do it?" Come on! You know how they did it, they adjusted their eating habits and started exercising.
That just not the answer people want, they want to hear stuff like: "I eat half a lemon every two days" or "I stuffed a peeled potato up my butt to absorb nutrients slowly through the day".
Some advice is ignored because people don't like the answer, right as it may be.
Homeownership (or a more city-oriented construct), civic impact, career growth, retirement, family planning, marriage, growing a business, investment, becoming a grantee, doing 10 pullups, you name it.
I suppose for me, it's finding some sort of meaning in life - it's been rather elusive, and makes it hard to care about any of those; though I can do ten pullups.
For me, goals and meaning are less an innate property, but things that are built over time as the result of positive feedback from direction and momentum. I didn't start with them, but as I try things, my identity changes to hold a goal more deeply.
An analogy is a rock at the top of the mountain. It doesn't have much direction but maybe vague sense that it could be nice to go somewhere and do something. If it moves around a little, it starts to be pulled in a direction, ever so slightly. The Further it goes, the characteristics of the rock change, pulling it more, and repeating the process.
Somehow the nihilism always creeps in - the older I get the less I seem to be able to believe in anything, as the evidence accumulates that no one else does either. I suppose I'm one of those smart people who the OP suggested has pissed it all away, but I never really got what it was I was supposed to be doing.
It doesn't feel like a blank check. You still gotta get up and go to work every day to pay the bills and then do whatever chores you can muster up the will and time to take care of.
I was thinking about meaning. My understanding is that nihilism is more about a lack of higher purpose, opposed to a lack of action.
I agree that work and chores are tough if you don't have a reason to be doing them. Similarly, will and motivation also require a goal, so that would be a challenge without one.
Different people have different communication styles. It helps if we recognize that. As advice givers, and as advice receivers. Recognizing that difference exists is a huge step in understanding how this works. Don't worry, it will still blow up in your face.
If you know someone tends to want to vent, well, let them vent and only later offer, rather than give advice - if even that. They just like to vent. Fair.
If you know someone would love support that actually listens to the problem and thinks and offers words beyond the cliché. Well, then it will be well received. Fair also.
The problem is when you think venting is the only thing people do. Because then you can't be supportive in the way someone wants who is not venting. Or when you are oblivious and venting never came to your mind because that's not your communication style. And it shocks you when your advice is received with annoyance or anger.
Different people are different.
So now you can read the rest of the comments with a different perspective. Let's pick one: "Smart people want to solve their own problems." Well, actually... SOME smart people would love some support now and then even while they are smart. It's possible to be smart enough to understand that a different viewpoint or experience can be valuable. Most likely what the smart person doesn't want is the most bog standard cliché in response to their distress: they are smart, they found that cliché in their first google search a few years ago.
“Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.”
Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '99
Wear sunscreen
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it
A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists
Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable
Than my own meandering experience, I will dispense this advice now
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth, oh, never mind
You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth
Until they've faded, but trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back
At photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now
How much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked
You are not as fat as you imagine
Don't worry about the future
Or worry, but know that worrying
Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing Bubble gum
The real troubles in your life
Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind
The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday
Do one thing every day that scares you
Saying, don't be reckless with other people's hearts
Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours
Floss
Don't waste your time on jealousy
Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind
The race is long and in the end, it's only with yourself
Remember compliments you receive, forget the insults
If you succeed in doing this, tell me how
Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements
Stretch
Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life
The most interesting people I know
Didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives
Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't
Get plenty of calcium
Be kind to your knees
You'll miss them when they're gone
Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't
Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't
Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the 'Funky Chicken'
On your 75th wedding anniversary
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much
Or berate yourself either
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else's
Enjoy your body, use it every way you can
Don't be afraid of it or what other people think of it
It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your own living room
Read the directions even if you don't follow them
Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly
Get to know your parents, you never know when they'll be gone for good
Be nice to your siblings, they're your best link to your past
And the people most likely to stick with you in the future
Understand that friends come and go
But a precious few, who should hold on
Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle
For as the older you get
The more you need the people you knew when you were young
Live in New York City once but leave before it makes you hard
Live in northern California once but leave before it makes you soft
Travel
Accept certain inalienable truths
Prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too, will get old
And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young
Prices were reasonable, politicians were noble
And children respected their elders
Respect your elders
Don't expect anyone else to support you
Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse
But you never know when either one might run out
Don't mess too much with your hair
Or by the time you're 40 it will look 85
Be careful whose advice you buy but be patient with those who supply it
Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past
From the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts
And recycling it for more than it's worth
But trust me on the sunscreen
I think what most people actually want, when they ask for advice, is to be told that they should do what they're already doing, and therefore that it isn't their fault that things aren't working out. Problem is, that doesn't actually get them to anywhere better than where they currently are.
> If you really want to have impact, focus on giving advice that is easy to follow.
Interesting. Tweaking it slightly: advice that is easy for the person you're advising to follow. This requires actually knowing them enough to know what would be easy or hard (including emotionally) for them to do. So, maybe if you don't know them that well, you should be cautious about giving advice...
Sometimes I want advise on a specific topic but don't have anyone to ask / discuss with.
Could be because the people around me are part of the topic (e.g. relationship problems), or they don't know the domain well or maybe it's not something I'm comfortable sharing with friends.
I keep thinking if this is a form of "social networking" that can be of benefit / some form of social good. Connecting people that have knowledge / wisdom in some particular aspect of life (I'm particularly biased towards the elderly, lots of life experience), but also more (hopefully) objective (they don't know you). Tinder for advise?
This applies to startups. I give good advice to the CEO. The CEO often ignores my advice, and so the startup is destroyed. The startup would have done better if we had followed my advice. I documented a case here:
I struggle with the question, "How do I manage upwards? How do I gain influence over the CEO?"
Often the problem is that there is a group of people who tell the CEO exactly what the CEO wants to hear. Some of these people are manipulative con artists, but others are folks who sincerely agree with the CEO.
So then the question becomes, "When multiple people give the CEO advice, how does the CEO know that my advice is the correct advice?"
The problems are well-illustrated in the article linked above. Does Alice have foibles? Does that make her unable to follow advice? Likewise with the CEO. Would the startup even be having so many problems if the CEO was more talented? If the CEO was smart enough to know that my advice was the correct advice then would the company be in trouble at all? Wouldn't the CEO have already foreseen and forestalled the problem from existing?
Most people don't realize they're in free fall when you offer them a parachute, and most advice will tell you to take skydiving lessons in mid-fall.
Giving advice is a bet; taking it is a risk. For both, awareness and context are key.
It might be more effective to refrain from giving advice. Instead of solving problems, we should focus on helping people recognize where they are and whether this place is in free fall: Does the ground seem further away than usual to you?
In a lot of situations, it is a social expectation to ask for advice, even if you have no intention of following it.
At the same time, it is socially inappropriate to tell someone you don’t want their advice because you disagree with their opinions/life decisions/etc.
Which is why, as a general rule, I think you should only take advice from people that have the same situation that you want to have - unless it’s negative advice not to do what they did.
This lines up with one of the best pieces of advice I've ever received: if you want to accomplish something, find someone who's done it successfully, and do what they do.
Basically, follow a proven recipe for success. Don't try to figure everything out yourself, pretty much anything you might want to do has already been done, and done well, by someone.
No, you can't teleport back to the beginning of the computer revolution, so you can't "do everything Steve Jobs or Bill Gates did."
Nor is this advice typically intended for some extreme example like becoming a billionaire or president. It's more like: if you want to have a successful marriage, imitate the guy that's been married for 25 years, don't listen to the advice of the twice divorced guy (unless he's telling you what not to do.)
Surprising that culture isn't mentioned once in the article. Advice does work, and people follow it, but only in professions, cultures, places where people have a certain respect for experience.
Skilled musicians with good mentors almost certainly listen to advice, because most of them very early had to figure out how to get rid of all their self learned terrible habits and then really paid attention because that sucks.
People in cultures with respect for seniority listen to advice, people who have served in the military tend to listen to advice.
I don't know who the author is but given some of their other articles I suspect they're surrounded by a lot of people who don't listen to advice... because that's exactly what they've been told since they've grown up (ironically maybe the first and last advice they listened to, technically). If you're in a culture that devalues mentorship, authority of teachers and where mistakes aren't really considered mistakes until you've made them yourself it's not that surprising that nobody ever takes advice.
I like the analogy of a physical trainer or coach using cues to help the trainee perform a movement correctly.
They translate their knowledge of bio-mechanics and human anatomy to sensory information a non-expert can use to take action.
I think that may be the formula: Having trust as an authority and being able to communicate actionably. Miss either one and the "consumer" won't or can't take your advice.
Advice is “useless” in the same sense that reading a book is useless.
You are receiving compressed knowledge while your capacity to accomplish goals is iterated through more complex experiences.
Like reading, advice needs to be unpacked, put into practice, reinterpreted, tweaked - to the point that whatever inputs came as words are now a network of ideas/experiences/memories/tricks.
Not everyone can give good advice, but there is people out there that can.
In my opinion, the best advisers are those that understand people's personalities and adapt for them. Most people out there do not like thinking, but some people think A LOT, even too much. You can not give the same advice to both groups: "Think before you act" only will work with the first group. It will be just wrong for the second. "Act impulsivelly without thinking" will be much better, because they will think too much by default.
The same applies to any aspect of personality: extroversion and introversion. Openness, domination level... Someone is a visionary or loves to start projects but hates following through.
Most of the time the best advice is stopping doing what you hate and finding someone who loves it. If you are introverted and love spending time on your own like reading books do not try to go to meet people all the time selling stuff, let extroverted people do that. If you are extroverted, do not stay at home programming alone for hours. Let introverted people do that.
If you have a company you need to be a visionary and have great ideas about what the customer needs but at the same time you need to execute and implement on those ideas. Visionary/executor usually are opposite personalities. You need both in order to succeed. Most people try hard to be what they are not instead of looking for complementary personalities. I have seen so many solo founders destroy their life just because of not understanding this simple thing.
Those that ignore personality differences will give terrible advice. I have seen parents forcing on their children advice on something that was very difficult for the parents to understand but the children have different personalities and they don't have the same problem. They don't need the same advice because they are different to there parents.
> "Act impulsivelly without thinking" will be much better, because they will think too much by default.
But the telltale signs of ADHD are a hyperactive mind AND an acute impulsivity. Overthinking goes hand in hand with being impulsive, probably because it's harder to tell the right thoughts apart from the wrong ones since they're all mixed together. There's a threshold after which you just go with whatever your current thought is, because you're so tired from analyzing all the possibilities.
You can get decent at things very quickly by following advice like the rock climbing example. The trick is doing the right thing “even if”. Even if you see a handhold but not a foothold, push from your legs instead of pulling with your arms.
Progressing from 0 to experience to decent can be fast if you’re willing to make second choices. Realize that as a novice, your first impulse is probably wrong. If it comes into conflict with the advice of people who know what they’re talking about, find a second or third impulse. Maybe you need a little more time to find that foothold.
This is a type of discipline, but a small discipline. It’s not about waking up at 4am and doing hours of drills every day. It’s about doing any amount of practice properly, even if there’s something that feels easier in the moment.
(This leads into another rant of why “find what works for you” is the antifreeze of advice - tasty and toxic. It takes people out of a learning mindset and puts them in a judging one.)
One of the most frustrating things in life is dealing with someone who says one thing, but really feels a different way (this is obvious after writing it down). Consider someone who is asking for advice for a problem that they don't really want to solve. i.e. somebody is overweight, but they don't really want to change anything about their lifestyle to lose weight. They value the food they eat and their activities more than any consequences they might bring. So, any advice given to them on losing weight would be dead on arrival - but the receiver would never admit that.
I feel like this is a variation on, or perhaps an elaboration of, "You can't tell people anything":
> What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted. Also, most people aren’t very good at visualizing hypotheticals, at imagining what something they haven’t experienced might be like, or even what something they have experienced might be like if it were somewhat different.
Advice is a solution to a problem. When you give advice, you need to understand where a person is on this awareness scale:
1. Problem unaware
2. Problem aware
3. Solution aware
4. Implementation aware
5. Very aware
If you approach someone with advice about the best way to speed up their DB, but they don't think that their DB is slow, they won't listen to you.
If you approach someone with advice that RabbitMQ is the best message queue, but they have no idea what a message queue is, they won't listen to you.
You need to understand where a person is before you give advice. When talking with them, you need to adapt your language to their awareness level.
Problem unaware people either don't have a problem. If you want to give them advice, ask questions that will make them realize that there is a problem.
Problem aware people know that they have a problem but don't know that a solution exists. A while ago I knew that setting up my own MTA was a pain, but I did not know that SaaS email senders existed! When speaking to people like this, let them know that a solution exists for the problem, and see if they are interested in hearing more.
Solution aware people know that a solution exists, but don't know which particular solution is best for them. This is a good time to give advice and make them aware of a particular implementation.
Implementation aware people know about a sufficient solution for their problem, but might not be aware of how to fine-tune it, or about other solutions that offer a different set of tradeoffs. This is a time to have an in-depth conversation.
Unsolicited opinion is just noise. If someone wants advice, in addition to the conclusion, they need to hear the reasoning and contextual facts that make that advice useful and reliable.
Everyone knows that 95% of advice is opinion. So they filter it out. That's why almost all advice doesn't move the needle.
The author uses rock climbing as an example. Notably, in most climbing circles there is an almost universally disliked personality type - someone who runs around a gym or outdoor climbing area shouting advice at climbers on routes. Most people find this annoying, distracting, and also it ruins the fun involved in figuring a problem out by yourself. Thus the rule to learn in climbing - if you want climbing friends and partners - is to never give advice to someone on a route unless they explicitly ask for it.
The clear exception to this rule is when you see that someone has done something that might get them killed - forgotten to tie into the rope, clip into the anchor, etc.
This also applies to laboratory and manufacturing work with dangerous chemicals and equipment. If people can't follow protocols designed to keep them from serious injury, even after it's been explained to them repeatedly why those protocols exist, the only advice worth giving is 'find another career where you're less likely to poison/maim yourself and your co-workers.' This tends to cause interpersonal conflict, so such people are often instead promoted into a position where they can do little harm. Some people even game this, hoping a display of incompetence will keep them from being assigned difficult work.
It's thus usually best to keep your advice to yourself when dealing with other adults, unless they come to you and say "I'm stuck, what do you think I should do with this problem?"
> the only advice worth giving is 'find another career where you're less likely to poison/maim yourself and your co-workers.' This tends to cause interpersonal conflict, so such people are often instead promoted into a position where they can do little harm.
I mean you say they should find another career where they're less likely to cause harm, and yet you're upset when they obtain a position where they can do little harm.
I think people avoid taking advice because taking advice is actually really difficult. Nobody has actually "been in your shoes." You have to try to understand why they said what they said, then try to apply it to your situation. Not a trivial task.
If you're seeking advice, I've found many people who have "been in my shoes" in regards to a specific topic and found their advice extremely helpful. In a few cases it completely changed my life. The problem is everybody else.
"Do you know what the difference is between your advice and this coffee? I asked for the coffee."
Anchoring bias is the core of most poor decision making. For example, someone that publishes a poorly generated webpage using mostly llm/chatGPT. Assuming algorithms won't flag the farmed slop content, and drop it to page 87 of future search results.
One could appeal to the publishers better nature, confront the shenanigans, or recommend a fiscally advantageous posture. Yet, after all is said and done... the appeal of duping people will hijack the commonsense region in some peoples brains.
Anecdotally, I have observed people tend to double-down on mistakes, especially when their ego is involved in that decision process.
What was truly amazing is the level of engagement well structured nonsense can solicit. =3
I can’t relate to neither the article nor the comments here.
I ask and follow people’s advice all the time, and people ask and follow my advice all the time.
I need a new car? I’ll ask to the guy-I-know-who-knows-about-cars.
My in-laws want a new computer? I’ll happily tell them about the pros and cons of computer x and y.
At work, everyone asks everyone what they think is the best course of action.
And somehow it happened to me a handful of times that a random friend of mine tells me that their successful career started because of some advice I gave them. It’s a very rewarding thing.
Some people don’t take exactly your words, some people don’t follow anything, but god, don’t make it a generality…
I also had really great experience with advisers. For example, when I was young, I was tall and athletic but very bad with the women that I wanted to date, so I just looked for people that were good with women and started going out with them and asking advice.
Probably the advice they gave was not that good because they were naturals at what they did and did not understood what they did well. But doing what they did and comparing it with what I did before was extremely useful and my life changed radically.
I have repeated the process so many times in my life with different groups of people: If I wanted to sell well or make more money I went and hanged out with exceptional sellers and understood their thinking and then I started selling well as well.
What happens with lots of people is they tend to despise or envy those that are better than them, specially in socialist countries where envy is celebrated and sometimes imposed as a philosophy of life(I have lived in socialist countries). If you envy the man that is better with women that you are, it will be impossible for you to learn anything from him. You will always find a way to justify that you are right and the System is wrong and unfair and the System should be corrected for them so they don't need to change anything.
Advice is complicated. The article does a good job opening up the topic.
Advice has the connotation of being the conclusion of the discovery of the problem. When the recipient doesn't understand or won't act on the advice, it should be the start of the conversation, more questioning than stated suggestions, like in the hinting examples about coffee. In most situations, a lot of that conversation will be about getting the advice recipient to agree there is a problem to solve. Not everyone will be willing to have that conversation long enough to see there is a problem.
The source of our acts of freedom leans more heavily towards our unconscious. This is because our consciousness is ruled by social order, economic order, ideology etc. We take facts, advice that fit what our unconscious can use. For example, we never fall in love because of facts/pros/cons, but only realize afterwards that it has happened. It's not so much that advice doesn't work, but rather provocation to think is what works and advice is about surplus enjoyment of the advisor.
I think about this sometimes and I think the article is on to something when they point out that often advice is describing the outcome, not really how to get there. You see this often is sports training.
For instance, in golf you'll often see instructors on YouTube or in a blog say that you need to "create lag" and to have "shaft lean at impact" when describing the ideal state of the golf swing at certain intervals. But these are missing the point entirely - you don't force lag or shaft lean. They are byproducts of other swing mechanics and will occur when those mechanics are performed well and in proper sequence with good timing.
You see this happen where the effect is mistaken for the cause. So of course the person doesn't take the advice because they fundamentally misunderstand the problem to be solved or the actions required to get into the state that indicates good form. The outcome is mistaken for the process.
The thing is, even if someone listens to you with great intent, their life experience will usually preclude them from having to give any actionable advice. That's why, if someone is seeking you out for advice, you might want to stop and take the time to talk to them about their issue. They're seeking you out because they feel that your experience and problem resolution could potentially be valuable to them.
A different perspective.
We all have our shadows, of things we believe to be but hurt us .
When we need advice its usually about these topics. So the advice conflicts with our beliefs and we cannot act on them .
Since these beliefs are hidden (shadows) then we ha e feelings against the advice and we rationalize why its wrong.
In the proposed analysis, the answers are rationalizations of the feelings we have.
Nobody asked, but here's my advice on advice. Instead of giving advice, ask questions. Questions are much harder to ignore than advice, and they force the listener to think through their problem from a different perspective. If you master the art of asking questions, people will be solving their own problems during your conversation, and you'll never have to give advice again.
Often people don’t want advice, often people have stupid ideas and come to you for advice, hoping you’ll confirm their stupid idea is great. Then they have somebody to blame when the whole thing will blow up.
I’ve had just one person who regularly takes my advice, and is wildly successful from it. No idea why this person, my wife’s cousin, takes my advice and no one else does. Almost makes it more frustrating for when I give advice to others, who of course don’t take it.
Sometimes i think people give advice because its easier to tell someone how to do something in theory then actually do it.
Most of the time, there are multiple ways of doing something, with trade offs, and advice is just one choice in that space. People who are actually doing things get to make that choice.
Language can only describe a tiny fraction of human experience. I think this is where language based advice for physical things starts to break down (e.g. please explain exactly how I should move my arm, hand and fingers to pick up a cup of coffee).
Honestly, after giving and taking a lot of advice in my life, I think the problem is people have something (A) they want to do in a situation, they then ask all their friends / family / mentors for advice, and even if 9/10 say to do B, they listen to the one person who says to do A. So it's not that people don't listen to advice, they just shop around and listen to somebody's advice that fits the desires they already have.
This has lead me to think the best thing you can do for yourself is to just ask a select few people who you really trust for advice. You still might not listen but at least you'll go into a decision knowing you're not listening to any of the advice you received.
Perhaps wisdom isn't valued enough. Perhaps people think data is the same as knowledge, and knowledge is the same as wisdom. Both are wrong, wisdom is far superior. Common sense is gained by reasoning and experience, are these two tools falling out of value?
Context! As an advice giver, it's so simple, people /just/ need to do X and it will solve all their problems. As someone on the receiving end, it's always more complicated. Unless we're talking about like lifting or climbing advice.
It works if it is given the right way, even if unsolcited, I think: Help the advisee to make the crucial deductions themselves. If you don't have the time for that, just leave them be, or you'll probably do more harm than good.
I give lots of advice but I always caveat with: "I don't know what I'm talking about; get as much advice as you can; in the end, make up your own damn mind."
2 days ago someone posted on FB a message protesting people
for not wearing bike helmets on a nature trail.
A 20ft wide dirt path bordering a river (as flat as it gets) that goes on for miles.
There was serious push back. Mind your own beeswax.
Advice can be seen as the slippery slope to coercion and manipulation.
I was once riding my scooter on a clean street with no cars or traffic anywhere around. The next thing I knew, I was regaining consciousness in front of first-responders.
If I wasn't wearing a helmet that day, they would be picking bits of skull out of my brain, and I wouldn't be able to type this comment.
How do you win a race against Usain Bolt?
Just run faster than him!
Every time one gives the other a technically correct but perfectly inapplicable advice, we just answer "yeah, run faster". It's our own private joke of a shortcut keeping our BS in check.
The thing is, when you are giving advice, you are usually missing a lot of context. Context you may not know exists, and that the other person won't or can't share with you. Maybe the other person doesn't even realize this context is needed or is aware of it.
But if you had this context, you would understand how unpractical your advice is to this particular situation, because it's too generic. Too theoretical.
After all, most smokers know they should quit, most fat people know they should lose weight. If it was just about hearing the right path, we would have little problems we can't solve.
But knowing where you should go tells you less than expected about the path ahead because of the aforementioned missing context, such as where you start from and the obstacles in your way, whether you'll be alone on the road or with friends or wild animals, if you have to carry a big bag, if you need to forage for food and if it rains.
That doesn't make advice useless.
But you should not expect to see the effect right now. Rather, they may contribute to a self-realization that the person has to build for themself, adapted to themself. It takes time, it's hard, and there are a lot of other things that fight for being a priority.
Assuming it was good advice to begin with of course, and there are not that many good advice to go around.
I find that people most eager to give unsolicited advice are people who are least equipped to give good advice. And people who need good advice the most are people who are least equipped to receive it. And it turns out that the same person can have both deficiencies; a version of Dunning-Kruger might be in effect here.
Is willpower even a large factor in habit formation? Isn’t that just a myth?
> Why? Probably because running is hard. I maintain that if you run the right way, it isn’t nearly as hard as it first seems. But it’s still hard. Buying headphones or installing an air purifier is incredibly easy.
Yeah running is hard. That’s what I thought for the first 38 years of my life. I was “running hard” like you’re supposed to. Then I overheard that, for aerobic fitness, it’s best to stick to “Zone 2” for maybe 80% of your running time. What, really?
So much more comfortable. In fact it can be invigorating.
So why did it take so long (and happenstance) to figure this out? When this is apparently what serious aerobic runners do nowadays? On one hand I’m not that surprised when I look at fitness (not sports, just recreational fitness) itself: lots of ego and self-identity around having the willpower (allegedly) to stick to their particular fitness regime, which includes othering those who do not.
> Is willpower even a large factor in habit formation? Isn’t that just a myth?
I'm not sure, but I do believe there is a difference in what it takes to form a habit by having to do something as opposed to forming a habit by stopping doing something. I think one of them takes willpower but not sure which one.
To me, you have to see the situation clearly, understand the other person em-pathetically AND manage to communicate the resolution of a complex situation that may unfold over a long time. Any of those things would be hard, but all of them together make advice a cursed problem. The author gives an example of his email cycle of marking emails as "Reply ASAP", ignoring them, feeling guilty and purging them. Is the real problem that he does this or that he does this and it makes him feel bad for some reason? Those are two very different problems that presumably require very different "solutions".
Seems to me if you're an advice-giver and you want to have an impact, be a mentor and come alongside your mentee.
If they should try yoga, and you are certain it would help them, pay for 6 months of membership at the gym for them, show up at their house every morning at 5am to pick them up for class, and do the darn yoga with them.
Sorry to be a grump, but one has to make a personal project out of people to get them to benefit from advice that they hadn't already decided to follow.
One factor I think this misses is that advice has to come from the perspective of a person who has the problem. And if you're in a position to give advice, you often do not have the problem (and you may have never had it to begin with).
As a concrete example: I have very poor executive function, and it was much worse in the past than it is today. I got a lot of advice for how to deal with that, but a lot of that advice involved strategies that work great when you have executive function and terribly when you don't. "Oh, just set a reward and have it after you do the thing", for example, only works if you can actually set and stick to such a rule. If you can't, it's useless.
What I had to learn was ways to route around the way my brain works. I am, as far as I can tell, basically incapable of feeling a reward that's more than a day or two away. (Yes, this is a weird trait to have as someone trying to run a company.) But that doesn't mean I can't pursue long-term rewards: it means I have to restructure them into shorter-term rewards that I can feel. I don't think about what will happen when my company succeeds in the long term. I think about "okay, I've done all the things on this to-do list for today, and now I can relax and go do something that isn't work for a while and not feel guilty about not working". That's a reward that works with the way my brain functions.
That understanding, in turn, required a sequence of steps that couldn't be easily skipped over. You have to do step N before you can do step N+1, because step N+1 often does not even make sense until step N is done. To quote my favorite book [1]:
> “It is good,” he thought, “to get a taste of everything for oneself, which one needs to know. That lust for the world and riches do not belong to the good things, I have already learned as a child. I have known it for a long time, but I have experienced only now. And now I know it, don’t just know it in my memory, but in my eyes, in my heart, in my stomach. Good for me, to know this!”
> [...] Therefore, he had to go out into the world, lose himself to lust and power, to woman and money, had to become a merchant, a dice-gambler, a drinker, and a greedy person, until the priest and Samana in him was dead. Therefore, he had to continue bearing these ugly years, bearing the disgust, the teachings, the pointlessness of a dreary and wasted life up to the end, up to bitter despair, until Siddhartha the lustful, Siddhartha the greedy could also die.
I couldn't have skipped to my current understanding of motivation from the point I was at five or ten years ago. I had to go through a sequence of steps to understand progressively more of it. I had to see what a ruin my life could be without long-term thinking to understand that it was important to work on in the first place. I had to be pushed into an environment with very short-term tasks to see that a motivated version of myself was possible at all. And I had to go back to being out of work for a bit to see that the improvements I'd made weren't permanent and that that fundamental dysfunction could still come back without the right structure.
None of these steps would have made sense in isolation. Each made sense only in light of the previous one. And they had to start at the beginning.
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So when I'm giving advice, I try to frame it in terms of how I learned the lesson, as it looked from the inside. Here's an example, from a post [2] I made here on HN a while back, discussing my understanding of [disordered] anxiety:
> Before I got hired on to my first proper job at Triplebyte, my life was not going very well. Employers wouldn't give me the time of day, I had no idea what (if anything) I was good at, and I didn't have any direction; this era of my life involved bad enough mental health that it very very nearly killed me. It wasn't just anxiety, but anxiety was certainly a part of it. I'd spend almost every night with my head going in loops I'm sure you'll recognize: "I didn't do anything today so I'll never do anything so I'll always be miserable and it's all my fault" being the gist.
> Fast-forward a bit. I was about six weeks into my new job, and everything in my life was turning around in a way that seemed almost miraculous. But I found myself in bed ruminating anyway. That voice in my head did not acknowledge any of the ways my life had improved. It didn't care that my income had gone up an order of magnitude, that I'd found a community of people I loved, that I seemed to actually be good at something. What it cared about is that I hadn't done anything else. It pulled up every example it could find where I'd done less than perfectly during that time. I'd screwed up something at work that I felt bad about. I wasn't getting out and socializing as much as I'd like to. I wasn't exercising. Look at all these ways I was screwing up that would ruin my life!
> But the benefit of having such a dramatic change in circumstances is that it makes the ways in which that voice doesn't care about reality much more obvious. I remember having a clarifying moment of "wait, wait, wait, hold on, everything is WAY better than it used to be, why the hell does this voice sound exactly the same?" It became clear to me in that moment that that anxious/self-critical voice (anxiety and depression are one voice in my head) clearly wasn't coming from my circumstances, because my circumstances had changed dramatically and the voice hadn't.
The thrust of this discussion, of course, is the idea that your anxiety probably isn't coming from your circumstances either. But framing it as a realization about my own process of understanding:
- starts from the perspective of what the problem "looks like from the inside"
- provides a framework for how to take the next step for someone who is at an earlier one
- provides an external pattern to look at that can help them recognize their own patterns and find the next step in the first place
- removes their ego from the equation by being about how I was wrong about something then, rather than telling them how they are wrong now
"Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?
Yes, you say?
Try again.
Yes?
You’re probably deluding yourself.
You wouldn’t change.
Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?
This revelation unnerved many people in the audience last November at IBM’s “Global Innovation Outlook” conference. The company’s top executives had invited the most farsighted thinkers they knew from around the world to come together in New York and propose solutions to some really big problems. They started with the crisis in health care, an industry that consumes an astonishing $1.8 trillion a year in the United States alone, or 15% of gross domestic product. A dream team of experts took the stage, and you might have expected them to proclaim that breathtaking advances in science and technology — mapping the human genome and all that — held the long-awaited answers. That’s not what they said. They said that the root cause of the health crisis hasn’t changed for decades, and the medical establishment still couldn’t figure out what to do about it.
Dr. Raphael “Ray” Levey, founder of the Global Medical Forum, an annual summit meeting of leaders from every constituency in the health system, told the audience, “A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral.” That is, they’re sick because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of environmental or genetic factors beyond their control. Continued Levey: “Even as far back as when I was in medical school” — he enrolled at Harvard in 1955 — “many articles demonstrated that 80% of the health-care budget was consumed by five behavioral issues.” Levey didn’t bother to name them, but you don’t need an MD to guess what he was talking about: too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise."
...
"Reframing alone isn’t enough, of course. That’s where Dr. Ornish’s other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren’t eating everything they want, but they aren’t making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish’s tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. “These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator,” he says. “When people who have had so much chest pain that they can’t work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, ‘These are choices worth making.’ ”
While it’s astonishing that most patients in Ornish’s demanding program stick with it, studies show that two-thirds of patients who are prescribed statin drugs (which are highly effective at cutting cholesterol) stop taking them within one year. What could possibly be a smaller or easier lifestyle change than popping a pill every day? But Ornish says patients stop taking the drug because it doesn’t actually make them feel any better. It doesn’t deal with causes of high cholesterol, such as obesity, that make people feel unhealthy. The paradox holds that big changes are easier than small ones.
Research shows that this idea applies to the business realm as well. Bain & Co., the management consulting firm, studied 21 recent corporate transformations and found that most were “substantially completed” in only two years or less while none took more than three years. The means were drastic: In almost every case, the CEOs fired most of the top management. Almost always, the companies enjoyed quick, tangible results, and their stock prices rose 250% a year on average as they revived.
IBM’s turnaround hinged on a radical shift in focus from selling computer hardware to providing “services,” which meant helping customers build and run their information-technology operations. This required a momentous cultural switch — IBMers would have to recommend that a client buy from competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft when it was in the client’s interest. But the radical shift worked: Services have grown into IBM’s core business and the key to its success.
Of course, radical change often isn’t possible in business situations. Still, it’s always important to identify, achieve, and celebrate some quick, positive results for the vital emotional lifts that they provide. Harvard’s Kotter believes in the importance of “short-term wins” for companies, meaning “victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum. Without sufficient wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous, and meaningful to others, change efforts invariably run into serious problems."
via:
"FastCompany; By Alan Deutschman: Change or Die ; All leadership comes down to this: changing people’s behavior. Why is that so damn hard? Science offers some surprising new answers — and ways to do better."
Cuban Missile Crisis is a bad example. In a hindsight, advice by Taylor and LeMay for airstrike was spot on. That would be the best way to solve Soviet problem once and for all.
Back then, no one could precisely know, and on a tactical level, advice was bad - the missing thing is that Soviet nuclear weapon stocks especially mated to delivery vehicles were many times smaller than believed, so any probable scenario lead to either a clean U.S. victory/Soviet capitulation and dismantlement of Communism, or simply thorough elimination of all Eastern Bloc.
1. It doesn't matter what your title is, how much expert education, training, or experience you have, or even what hard lessons that you have learned: you are not an "expert" in an area unless you are invited in as an "expert". Put another way, unsolicited advice is unwelcome.
2. Smart people want to solve their own problems. Don't offer solutions. No one will feel empowered or much of a sense of accomplishment implementing your solution. Instead tell them the challenges that they will face for various options and let them draw their own conclusions.
3. Your spouse just wants to vent, UNLESS they say "fix it" in which case they want you to fix it, where "fix" means "make it act like I want it to". Your spouse does not want to know how it works so that they can fix it themselves next time, and their mental model is wrong and they don't care to correct it. Just listen, figure out what they want and do it yourself, and do it again next time even though it interrupted you and they could have fixed it themself.