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?"
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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]
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
"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.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadI'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?"
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
I never understood Existentialism as a serious proposal.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
1. Ostensibly. Should statements themselves have their own issues. https://www.thinkingbugs.com/should-statements
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'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.
See also The Rationality Paradox: Balancing Logic and Emotion - https://fastercapital.com/content/The-Rationality-Paradox--B...
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.
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.
That’s pretty much it.
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had some screening questions.
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".
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.
If someone is the recipient of that kind of complaining as a kid from a parent, it would also explain some ‘don’t even try that towards me’ reactions.
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.
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?"
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.
It apparently affects physicists too, and must be common enough to warrant two xkcds. [1][2]
0. https://web.archive.org/web/20071226220909/http://www.pcmag.... 1. https://xkcd.com/1831/ 2. https://xkcd.com/793/
It makes them great for advice because they arent going to use emotions or hopes.
But also, in this case, me and my wife are 2 business owners that have been doing it for a decade. This person started a few weeks ago.
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?
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).
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 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”
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.
What implied it was binary?
I think that is your own thoughts.
> What is better? The person that says "You look beautiful", or "You have a piece of fuzz in your hair?"
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.
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.
If you're struggling with a problem, do you usually need someone to act smarter than you or tell you to be quiet?
"People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others."
- Blaise Pascal, 1670
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.
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!"
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
- Persuasion is pegged to a person.
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.
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 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'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.
An independent professional can confirm real problems. Sometimes they're significantly more useful than friends. Sometimes less.
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.
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.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40936357
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is poor advice: every person accomplished in $FOO has had a large component consisting of luck.
You can do everything Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Obama did, and still not get anywhere close to accomplishing what they 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.)
That is my list of successes at 45 years of age.
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.
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.
Cues aren't advice.