Our obsession with non-obvious advice stems from our base addiction to novelty. For good reason, pathways in our brain become myelinated and more efficient the more often we use them, to the point where we can process well-worn thoughts almost subconsciously. Thus, toys we've played with too long become boring. Advice we've heard too many times before seems blah.

We're hardwired to notice more when we encounter things we've never heard or seen before. Novel advice just pops.

However, most good advice is common advice. In practically any field, grokking the fundamental advice and actually sticking to it will get you 99% of the way there. As Charlie Munger once said, "Take a simple idea, and take it seriously."

But the fundamentals are boring. We'd prefer to ignore them and say, "Yeah yeah I know that already," even if we're totally ignoring it. Then we retweet the next dopamine hit of novel advice we see on Twitter.

I disagree strongly with the article's central thesis, but it is still worth critically examining the source and utility of advice. Even honest and sincerely given advice is often more a form of nostalgia on the part of the giver than a lucid examining of your specific situation and the nuances therein.

It's most often a form of "well this is what I wish I'd done when I was in a similar situation years ago" or "here's what I did when I was in your position and let me tell you how great a choice it was." That is meaningfully distinct from and a lot more common than the much more useful version "I once had something similar happen and afterwards concluded that I should have done X, but the world has changed over the decades and now it seems like kX would yield better outcomes based on Y."

I disagree.

In my career I started getting close to the people that had already done what I wanted and just asked them for advice.

The advice they gave me was incredible and the most useful thing you could do.

The most important thing is that it must be an active process. You must do the work to decode and extract the information.

Different personalities will give you different advices. If someone has a very strong visceral nature, her advice is going to be "don't be too visceral, think before you act", because that is the advice she needs, but not what you need.

That advice is completely useless if your nature is thinking too much, and you don't have a problem thinking, you love to think all the time. The advice you need is acting instead of thinking, to take decisions.

So you need to be active and ask specifically the problems you are having when trying to do what you wanted. Most of the time you will realize the super big problems that you have are the most stupid and obvious thing for the person you are asking.

It is so easy for them because their own nature or personality makes it so for them. 9 times out of 10 they will give you an easy, "obvious" solution you never thought about.

VCs offer bad advice, because most of them are successful not because of the ruthless elimination process that is a startup, but despite. Meaning that they have no idea why they are successful. Take this example: Let's take 10 identical startups with identical traits doing the same thing in 10 places of the US. Some die because they burn money quicker, b/c SF salary is expensive. Others die because they are in rural US and don't get exposure to the right people. Or they succeed because lower cost of income allows for longer runways so they are still alive at the right time, as opposed to the SF startup. Or they might have a neighbor who knows someone who knows someone.

All of those that make it in the end will think they made it because they were smart and hard working and what not. Truth is that hard work and smarts are the lower entry barrier of success, not what takes you all the way to the top.

But then again VCs are mostly self-congratulating morons who will attribute their success to anything but luck.

Case in point: Anything from Sam Altman or Paul Graham.

I think part of the dynamic here is that when people give advice it often comes from one of two very different modes:

1. There's a piece of advice I want to give, and I'm going to give that advice to some degree regardless of the question or situation. Maybe I'll wait for a question where my advice fits, or maybe I won't, but it's a play _I_ want to suggest, so I'm going to suggest it. For example, "use Django" is advice I might give to anyone who asks anything about web apps because I know Django and it's easy advice to give.

2. I really listen to what someone's asking, and give them specific advice for their situation, without letting it be colored by my own experience or the moves that have worked for _me_ in the past.

The second is a lot less common! It's really hard to pay that level of attention, and force yourself to question your own assumptions. But it's also a lot more useful, since it's specific and tailored.

Critically, in a blogging context, only the first mode is really possible. There isn't someone asking for the advice, it's just me writing a blog post for some imagined asker. This is why most unsolicited advice isn't that useful, which absolutely includes whatever blog post you're reading. Including one of mine.

When I have a question, I rarely settle for one piece of advice. Instead, I read a bunch of them, often in a forum like this one. Inevitably people will start arguing with each other, and I will find myself sympathizing more with one or another side of the argument. Well, there you are: that's what I think I should do.

On the other hand, "how to be successful" is so nebulous that I think your first step is defining the question better. Of course the advice is vague and un-actionable, because what you need to do if "being successful" means being the world's greatest Tekken player is different than if it means starting a business, and different again if it means being a great parent, and different once more if it means doing well as an employee in the company you work for now (and among these one can imagine many more variations). I guess in most cases the unspoken premise here is that we're talking about a tech-based startup, but even then, if your startup has so few unique traits that you can ask such a broad question, what's your competitive edge, really?

Better title: Most (tactical business/career) advice is (rarely helpful in the general case, often unwise as long-term life strategies and full of survivorship bias).

Yep. Such books are written to get the author into the business equivalent of Oprah’s Book Club. They have the half-life of your average K-pop group.

The beef jerky and Mountain Dew at the feast of life insights. If you are starving and nothing else is available…

The In-and-Out burger wrappers in the library of worldly wisdom. They can, at least, be useful bookmarks…

VC give pretty bad advice in general. Their advice is the the description of founders they want to invest in. Most of the founders they give money to, more or less follow the advice they give (not directly, but because they have been selected like that). But as all vc most of their companies fails, showing that the advice in fact doesn't work.

Don't forget that if they really knew what to do to start a successful company they wouldn't be investors but founders

I've thought a lot about this recently: what type of person is subject to a greater amount of variance in the outcome of something due to good/bad advice than a founder?

Other professions with the potential for drastic upticks of success or net worth (e.g. a professional athlete, an entertainer) are so standardized that the advice to follow is pretty much down the center of the fairway.

Given the complexity/uniqueness of a company and its market, almost any piece of advice given to a founder is at best inadequate, at worst, gravely detrimental.

Paul Buchheit had a slide at founder school that read something like "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Over generalization" - I have no idea if I interpreted it correctly, but most advice I've received (and thought was great at the time) ended up being wrong. The people giving me the advice weren't being malicious - they were just looking at my problem with _their_ life experience and abstracting it a very general way.

And the worst part is - and I say this with a lot of experience - when someone else's advice was wrong, you can't blame them, you can only blame yourself.

Most advice is advice:

  advice, n.
    An opinion about what could or should be done about a situation or problem.
    Information communicated; news.
    An opinion recommended, or offered, as worthy to be followed; counsel; suggestion.

If the advice is based on something that has worked for someone, it is good advice. It's up to you to figure out if the advice will work for you. If the advice didn't apply to your own situation, or wasn't appropriate, it is your responsibility to figure that out, not theirs.

You can of course try to blame everyone else for the paths you choose to take in life: you didn't get the right advice; they didn't give you the right tools; they didn't explain something well enough. But none of that changes the fact that you, ultimately, are the only one that controls whether you will take that advice and use those tools, or go find others. You own your own decisions.

I disagree with the article somewhat, I think a more accurate take is that the well of good advice that is generally applicable is fairly shallow and once exhausted is not worth revisiting. From there you need to start looking for advice with an eye to the specific context of your life.

For me personally, the first time I understood that my life would be really easier if I was really good at something, and that the best way to get good at something was to work at it every day, was a bit of revelation. That may sound a bit silly to say, but we don't come into this world knowing everything. The advice has improved my life immensely and is exactly the advice the author is bashing but it was only good because I understood how to apply it.

You can take advice or leave it. If you take it and it works, it's not bad. If you can't or don't take it, that doesn't make it bad if somebody else could. It's bad only if, when you take it, it will produce a worse outcome for you. Most advice is not bad in that way.

The most useful thing a piece of advice can be is something you would not have thought of yourself, that somebody else learned by hard experience, that you wish somebody had said to you before you got it.

It is in the nature of the very best advice that it is not obvious why it is good advice. If it doesn't seem like good advice, it might be because you have just not thought it through.

What we can say is that most posts on substack are bad.

I think most advice is bad because the person giving the advice somehow also wants to sound like a hero or at least somebody you would want to look up to.

Unfortunately most of the times the reality to do the things for which the advice is sought is rather mundane and sometimes not even something a person would be proud off.

Like for example, if you want to be a very successful business the reality advice is to market more aggressively, lock people in your walled garden, save taxes, inflate prices, make a commission on other people's work, etc but the advice you give is make better products, innovate, make it user friendly, create brand loyalty, etc.

I agree that advice that "isn’t practical" is bad advice, as the article states.

I do NOT agree that advice that "isn’t insightful" or "is obvious" is bad advice.

The author complains that "Work hard" is bad advice, and I don't agree. Some people I meet are not willing to work hard. You may think it's obvious, but that doesn't mean it really is obvious. Even if it's obvious, people often need reminding of obvious things, because "obvious" things are easy to forget.

Vince Lombardi was famous at starting training from the beginning. He would start his training courses by telling highly-trained athletes, “this is a football.” https://jamesclear.com/vince-lombardi-fundamentals Excellent athletes continually train and excercise the fundamentals, because they are fundamental. "Obvious" things do require reminders. They require reminders because they're boring, & we often want to shift to the novel thing instead of focusing on the important thing.

Even worse, if it's novel, then it's often wrong. Sometimes the new can be really helpful - but seeking novelty for its own sake misses the point. You want good advice, not novel advice, and the two are not the same thing.

I agree with the title and disagree with the article.

I was hoping the article was going to talk about how much advice comes from survivorship bias and people's general inability to see the difference between cause and correlation of what they are recommending and true effect. On this subject, I could rant.

As others have pointed, "non-obvious advice" doesn't inherently have any reason it's better. The vast majority of people I know who struggle with problems aren't struggling because they haven't been told helpful advice, it's because of some combination of lack of conviction of the advice, lack of discipline, and in some cases (as the author points out) is hard to discover how to take the advice . (While advice that lays out clear actionability is good advice, I don't think that advice that is more general is bad advice.)

Take diet. I think you'd be hard pressed to find people who said salads were unhealthy. I believe most know that they would lead to less heart problems in the US, they are cheaper, and would help lose weight.

The more I have gone into philosophy and that path of many successful people, most of them have taken to simplifying everything they do. It's said that only masters can truly simplify. It's the amateur who overly complicates. But I digress; I firmly believe that obvious advice is often the most useful. Personally and professionally, most of the problems with advice that arise is that it wasn't followed, not that it needed to be non-obvious.

The best advice I ever got was that advice is pretty bad in general because the person giving the advice doesn't have skin in the game. It's usually much better when you instead tell the other person about relevant experience you've had in the past as a data point for them to base their decision on.

So: less "in your situation, I would do this", and more "when I was in this similar situation, I did this, and that happened".

I wonder if what people get out of the general advice literature is more like a reminder or motivation, rather than actual insight.

The issue with a lot of advice is that the world is insane. A lot of very very straightforward practical advice would make you a social outcast if you did it to a degree that it moves the needle.

For example, financially it makes PHENOMENAL sense to save almost everything you make right out of school and don't buy things or take on loans. Live like a hermit. Get the compounding interest going as fast as you can, early as you can.

But then you're a boring, lame, cheap person that gets backburnered as a second class friend for YOLO stuff, or even worse you won't be as appealing to mates.

Likewise, don't drink/smoke/do drugs/eat like shit when you are young. You get decades on the backend of life of FAR higher quality life (like, you are basically an average 20 year old in health into your 50s and 60s). But... again, that marks you as boring.

What people want is this amazing insightful advice that has no consequences to implement.

This also applies to doctors. You would think they are intelligent, highly trained and experts in their field. But the you look at the statistics for medical mistakes and how many people die every year from drug complications and it brings some needed perspective.

I think the problem is people are biased, and play out roles. You show a carpenter a nail that sticks up and he will hammer it down. What else would you expect, this is what he was trained to do.

A doctor is trained to give you drugs or operate, the bias is towards taking medical action. If he doesn't do anything and you die, he might get fired, your family would have a clear case to sue and so on. Even if statistical doing nothing may be preferable. It's just probably hard to nothing in some cases.

In my experience, most situations and their associated decisions are context sensitive, so most general advice is unhelpful, or even harmful. Heeding generalization is the root of many bad outcomes.

"Even for us, though, we can often increase our impact a lot by improving our generalized effectiveness."

This rings of Scott Adams' 'Talent Stack'. He posits that having expertise in multiple, unrelated fields both expands your generalized knowledge and helps you stand out in the combination of talents you possess. One example of a real person is one who holds expertise in artistry (oil painting), mechanical engineering, and cycling.

If I were to claim my own, it would be program management, poker and music.

Advice is a way to get someone else to try out your hypothesis.

Advice is best regarded as suggestions for future experiments. Nothing beats trial and error plus a willingness to do new things.

In my experience, I usually either get good advice that I'm not ready to act upon, or get bad advice because of a lack of good shared context. There is also a good amount of bad advice, but I rarely seek advice anyway so it doesn't amount to much. Perhaps take the post with a grain of salt, or on its own premise.

I’m reminded of a quote from the “Wear Sunscreen” song/speech from back in the 90s:

> Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

Changed over the decades? Your issue with advice is that the giver must have had something happen so long ago that they can tell you about how the world has changed in the meantime?

By your reasoning, you would have rejected that person's advice if they had given it to you earlier because it would have looked a lot like the form of advice you have an issue with.

Agreed — when I’m on the receiving end of advice, I try to suss out the distinction you describe. Is the advice-giver just lazily ruminating (usually the case) or are they actually thinking through my particular circumstances and reflecting on the optimal path given these constraints and/or plugging a particular blind spot holding me back? You can often feel, viscerally, the difference between the two types of advice-giving.