Alternative Sources of Advice

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42 pointsfniephaus3 comments

Good advice should give the receiver useful mental frameworks to contextualize the advice and to even reason it out themselves.

Of course this means that sometimes the advise won't be directly actionable, but it will be better in the meta sense because it will be like teaching to fish rather than handing over a fish.

Think of advising like presenting a decision tree to someone that THEY have to navigate. Your value add was in condensing abstract thoughts into a decision tree.

I like to think in terms of a "lens" for seeing the world through. My favorite advice has often given me a new concept or tool for understanding what I see in the world.

Sometimes it's a simple as giving a name to a phenomenon you've already experienced but failed to understand, sometimes as complex as a series of interrelated concepts that are totally new to you.

I use McIntyre's Law when both giving and receiving advice: "Under the right circumstances, anything I tell you could be wrong."

The other habit I've developed is, instead of asking "How can I do X?", I look for someone who seems to be successful at X and ask "How do you do X?" or more specifically, "How did you do X in this specific situation?"

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