Potato is yum

No advice I have ever heard for anything in my life is a perfect blueprint for the topic at hand. No advice. I stick by this opinion and will die on this hill. I will now explain why I choose to die on this three word hill.

The foundation of advice is another human’s experience. Is that other human me? No. Are they like me? Probably not. So why do I listen to advice? Because it’s helpful? Because they are successful, they must be doing something right? Let’s first get this whole thing straight. When I say advice what do I mean? When I say follow advice what does that mean? This laying down of framework is vital to the understanding of my argument so stick with me. We’ll get to meat and potatoes soon. So I define advice as the essence of one human’s experience that they believe, key phrase they believe, would aid other humans in excelling at something. I also believe that people give advice (good or bad) for their own personal benefit. A scholar aids a fellow scholar to help further their field. An artist helps a fellow artist to form a connection to potentially grow greater reach. A business helps another business to aid in developing their market for a more sophisticated product. So when one follows advice, I take it as someone using this blueprint made by another person and following it as closely as possible.

Now, there are multiple things wrong with following advice closely. First is the motive for telling advice. Nobody gives something at a loss. One might say “but a generous person would give without thought.” and to that I would respond that they lose material value but gain value that we can’t measure which is personal satisfaction. By exercising that virtue of generosity they still aren’t losing out and us outsiders see it as a loss because our calculus doesn’t value virtue as strongly as them. From this perspective, advice is not from the goodness of the heart. Advice is purely for personal gain. This might seem like a cynical view of it but I want to point out that the virtuous person will often make the gain of others part of their own gain through subjective and unmeasurable means. As such, I don’t label advice givers as selfish since the selfish person wouldn’t have the character of generosity. I have given a few examples for how people gain from giving advice and these are just small examples to get your brain thinking. Next time you hear someone giving advice, ask yourself, “why give the advice?”

The second reason is that the giver is not you. Their human experience cannot fully translate to you meaning you cannot apply their blueprint blindly like the follower would do. A simple copy and paste of advice would invalidate the need for development or internalization of the topic leading to the follower being incapable of developing the topic further as they are not living someone else’s life experience. Advice is a gross reduction of another’s experiences. No amount of advice can replace the living of such experiences thus it is unreasonable to conflate following advice with experience.

Advice is not enough. The final issue with advice is that people often say “Do these things” without knowing much about you as a person. Your experiences. Your situation. They don’t know you. And likely, they don’t care to know you that deeply. They wish to know you deeply enough for their benefit (depending on the character of the giver) but nobody wants to know that you peed in your bed at the age of 7 and cried to your father in the middle of the night (why are you staring at me like that? Not me. I swear.) When someone gives advice it is general. It is not tailored towards your lived experience but their own personal lived experience. As with the second reason, they are not you. This makes advice inherently flawed.

Flawed doesn’t mean useless. A poisoned drink is still a drink. It just takes a little processing and effort to remove the poison from the drink. So, how does one go about removing the poison? First of all, recognize why they wish to help you. The reason of, “they are a helpful person and take great satisfaction in helping a fellow human being.” is a great reason and is hopefully the reason you come up with. We take their motive into account to help with our calculus of how applicable their advice is to our life. Next, ask how their situation, career, ect relates to us right now? Did they publish a book that was a grand slam on the first hit? Did they struggle in the trenches for decades? Did they work a 9 to 5 being a desk for years before starting their company? What did they do? Why are they qualified to give you advice and do they know of what your life is like? Once you have judged all of these, the poison has mostly lost it’s potency and it is possible to drink the beverage with this antidote on hand in case the advice turns out to be harmful.

So… is this blog post poison? Yes. It is. Don’t take my word for it. In fact, I’ve never tried to make anyone believe the BS I spout here. I present my arguments and my reasons. My opinions change all the time. Why? Because I think about things. I love talking to people, thinking about things, figuring out how and why the world work. I like knowing. How can I live in a world I don’t understand?