Advice

I’ve been told that I give good advice. I’m always a little uncomfortable with that because there’s a common meme that all advice is bad. So I’ve reflected a fair bit on whether I do think it’s possible to give good advice, and I think it is. The meme is the compression of a statistical tendency–most advice is bad–into a binary statement.

Anyway, what I’ve found most useful for giving helpful advice is three things:

first, it’s a bad idea to give advice unless someone signals explicit openness to it (this should be obvious!)
second, it helps to think about it as a joint problem solving exercise from the beginning, rather than a kind of weird “advice giver/advice receiver” structural dyad (which is implicitly just a power hierarchy, and which sucks).
third, it helps to look for and really try to celebrate resistance to a suggestion or idea

That last one I want to explore a bit more. Most communication seems to fail because people talk past each other in one way or another–and I think it’s similar with advice. It’s easy to say something that sounds smart and would be useful in some context, just not this specific context. The best way to figure this out is to give a lot of space for someone to say that something isn’t helpful and why it’s not helpful. Now you’re suddenly talking about some shared conceptual object, which makes it a lot easier to triangulate the real challenges.

This does require being pretty comfortable being wrong in the short term (in service of being useful once the conversation is over), which is another reason why I like thinking about it as a problem solving exercise. It shifts the focus toward the outcome.

A true joint problem solving conversation also removes some of the pressure to give useful advice. Everyone knows it’s hard to actually solve problems. They wouldn’t be asking for advice if it were easy! Sometimes just trying to do so (or even just trying to understand the problem at all) is valuable to the other person:

people like having a rubber duck to talk to and often just make progress by generating tokens
people often appreciate having someone else validate that, yes, this is a hard problem
people appreciate seeing how someone else parses the situation

So maybe the point here is that it’s less about whether giving advice works or not and more about whether it’s possible to collaboratively solve problems with someone else–the work that ‘advice’ is doing is just saying that one person in the conversation has some experience that might be relevant to the problem at hand.