Most Advice Fails One of These Two Tests

We’ve never had more advice available to us. How come everyone isn’t wealthy, healthy, and happy as a result?

How come we aren’t all making $10,000 a week without working, or attracting 100,000 views a day on our blog, or whatever else it is that our hearts desire?

I’ll answer these questions by describing why most advice fails. I then offer a method for you to assess whether the advice you’re considering is right for you.

Here’s one reason people don’t take advice

Asa corporate lawyer, my business was giving advice. As a General Counsel for twenty years, I got used to people following my advice — whether they wanted to or not.

Now I’m just one voice among thousands, writing publicly about how to achieve better outcomes. People are entirely free to take my advice or ignore it. I’ll admit, I sometimes long for my authoritarian days.

I focus my writing on things I know best, which is what I’ve seen work in the real world over decades. (I list my core strengths below if you’re curious.) I’m trying to limit myself to only solid advice. So why don’t people take it every time?

Machiavelli has part of the answer. In describing rulers and their advisers in The Prince, Machiavelli said this:

There are actually three kinds of mind: one grasps things unaided, the second sees what another has grasped, and the third grasps nothing and sees nothing.

What group are you in?

This simple concept explains why the world is divided into an elite one percent, a highly effective 10 percent, and everyone else.

Only a tiny percentage of people are novel thinkers with great ideas. The next group can distinguish between great ideas and everything else, i.e., they can tell good advice from bad advice.

The final group is neither original nor discerning in their thinking — they are forever prone to making mistakes because they don’t recognize or follow good advice. It’s just not in their nature.

Can people change the group they’re in?

Particularly if you don’t start out naturally gifted, can you become a person who is able to at least identify good advice?

I’m convinced the answer is yes. (Otherwise, many of us are wasting a lot of our time trying to spread good advice.) How does one learn to identify good advice?

Do we trust a pundit because of their position or experience? Are we convinced by a good anecdote or testimonial? Do we want hard data backing up the expert’s claims?

In preparing my own advice, I read lots of other people’s advice. I can tell you, there’s a great deal of excellent advice out there. But there’s as much or more poor advice. Your first task is thus to identify advice worth considering.

Good advice must pass these two tests

It must work at all
It must work for you in your situation

Most advice fails one or both of these tests.

Advice that does not work at all is unquestionably poor advice. So why is it so common? It comes about because people repeat things they see frequently without exploring the underlying rationale.

To give you a few examples:

Pursuing your passion is a great way to work hard while going broke. Some people will be successful, but it will be because of many factors beyond their passion.
If you just keep doing something, eventually you will be successful. This fallacy gives rise to the immense profits of lottery operators and casinos. Not to mention the broken dreams of many a poet, pundit, or weather prognosticator. It’s easy to see that most people will fail at many activities no matter how long they persist.

Photo by Alice Donovan Rouse on Unsplash

Advice that does not work for you is also poor advice, at least as far as you’re concerned. This advice arises because people mistake anecdotes for evidence. That is, a well-meaning person says “This worked for me! Do what I did, and you will see the results I did.”

Uh, almost certainly not. You won’t get the results Tim Ferriss did by reading his books or listening to his podcast because you don’t think like Tim Ferriss. You won’t get Tim Denning ’s income by subscribing to his newsletter or taking his courses, because you don’t write like Tim Denning.

We’re fooled by such persons because they communicate engagingly and show a genuine desire to help. How can I not want to listen to someone successful and entertaining who is offering to help me?

What’s a person looking for self-improvement to do?

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

You must apply critical thinking to any advice you’re considering

Ask first, does it look like this advice ever works for anyone? What evidence do I have for this? Is it just folk wisdom that has been repeated endlessly, or is there any objective data I can assess?
Then ask, what are the conditions under which people have successfully implemented this advice? For example

— Does running a successful winery require $10 million in starting capital?

— What percentage of investors beat their benchmark performance in any given year? What percentage do so over ten years? Are factors other than luck necessary to explain the results?

— Is every person who just “writes every day” successful in time? Or is it that the large majority of writers stop, and some gifted ones continue on to success?

3.If you can identify conditions for success, be honest in assessing whether those conditions apply in your case. If not, that advice won’t work for you. If yes, keep thinking.

4.Next, explore other reasons why people have failed trying to implement this advice. What external factors influenced their outcomes? What individual-specific factors drove results? And so on.

5.If you meet the base conditions for success and the likely reasons for failure do not apply to you, you are not done. Now ask, what else did this person do that contributed to their success? Is there companion advice that you must also consider?

This is starting to sound like hard work, even to me. It also explains why people have a hard time identifying good advice and then successfully implementing it.

But now you’re armed with one method to determine whether someone’s advice is good for you.

Be well.

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Here’s what I give advice on

I write about getting what you want in your career in a weekly column in the ACC Docket.
I write about getting what you want in life (especially happiness and satisfaction) on my blog Klugne.
And here on Medium, I write about critical thinking, happiness, and writing better, among other things.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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