What advice should you follow?

So much advice people give is contradictory: in your 20s, you should travel the world, but also in your 20s, you should focus on your career. Don’t let things affect you, but also don’t be a pushover. If you’re failing at something, keep pushing through, but also, maybe it’s time to let go.

I’ve come to realize that most advice isn’t an absolute on what you should do, but rather a vector that pulls you in some direction. Take the contradictory advice of either pushing through or knowing when to give up when facing adversity. Let’s quantify this on a scale where a 1 means you give up right away when you fail and a 10 means you keep persisting no matter what. The advice of pushing through is less of a statement saying you should be a 8 or a 9 or a 10, but more of a statement pulling you towards a 10 - a vector rather than a scalar. Likewise, the advice of letting go is a statement pulling you towards a 1.

When you frame it like this, it makes more sense how both of these advices can be true. Let’s say the optimal value of where you should be on this scale is a 7 (which means pushing through adversity most times, but giving up if you fail too much). If you’re currently at a 6, then the advice of pushing through is helpful to hear. But if you’re currently at an 8, then the better advice is letting go.

Advice is rarely good or bad; it’s context-dependent. If you read some advice online or from a talk intended for a wide-ranging audience, it’s not really useful since they don’t know where you are. The lessons they learned made them come up with an advice vector that worked for them; it doesn’t mean it’ll work for you.

Even if your friend is telling you advice, it’s usually originating from their experience: advice that they wished they had heard. Their advice becomes relevant only if they know and deeply consider where you are now. It’s also iffy because maybe the optimal value on the scale for them could be different than for you.

I think that when receiving advice, you should consider where you are on the scale and where you want to be. You should think about if the person giving this advice knows where you are on the scale and where you want to be. Otherwise it’s a shot in the dark.

Experiences > Advice

Here’s the thing about mistakes. Sometimes, even when you know something’s a mistake, you gotta make it anyway

Ted Mosby

Sometimes I make the “wrong” decision, even though I know it’s wrong. When I was a kid, I loved the scent of vanilla. Ice cream, cake, every dessert uses vanilla, so I thought tasting vanilla extract by itself would be just as good. My mom told me that it didn’t work like that; you have to add it to something you bake. Obviously, she was right. I didn’t listen, tasted it, and immediately regretted my decision.

The supposed rational response here would’ve been to listen to my mom. She has much more experience than me and has no reason to lie. But I don’t think the lesson here is to always listen to those with experience. The lesson is that visceral experiences always have more of an impact than advice. You can tell me what hiking the Swiss Alps is like, showing me pictures, recordings, and souvenirs, and I still will not fully understand until I go myself.

For things to truly stick, it needs to be visceral. No quote is going to give you that feeling. Even if you know some advice is true, sometimes you’ll do the opposite of it, and that’s okay.

There’s also something to be said regarding exploration and exploitation; you should try deviating once in a while even when you have advice that you think is true.

Executing

I’m wary about the culture surrounding advice these days. It feels like people (myself included) collect aphorisms instead of acting upon them. Reading about advice and quotes gives you the illusion of progress. At some point, you have to execute.

I’m now a lot more skeptical about self-help books. Everything they say can be true, but how much of it is really impactful? It isn’t visceral and can be harmful by making you feel as if you’re being productive without doing anything.