Advice
Context is kind of important
Mozart
Charlie Munger often tells an apocryphal story about Mozart:
A young man, about 21 years old, comes to Mozart and says, “I am thinking about writing a symphony, do you have any advice for me?” Mozart says to him, “you are much too young to write symphonies.” The young man says, “But you were composing symphonies at nine years old!” Mozart smiles and replies, “Yes, but I wasn’t going around asking people for advice about it.”
With this story in mind, one of my least favorite questions of all time is, “do you have any advice for people who [fill in the blank]?” People love asking this question when guest speakers come to talk to a group, and I always roll my eyes. For those of you who jump to the microphone to ask questions of guest speakers, here’s some…advice…asking for someone’s favorite book or asking someone what their biggest mistake was are very easy questions that are 10x better than “do you have any advice for...”
One exception to my advice about advice might be if you are asking for very specific advice from someone who can provide you with technical insight afforded to them by their expertise. For example, if you are a new cryotherapy machine repairman, and you attend a cryotherapy machine repairman’s conference, feel free to ask the lunchtime panel of world-renowned cryotherapy machine repairpersons a question like, “do you have any advice about how I can arrange my tools to streamline my workflow so I can complete repair jobs faster?” Or “when a machine goes down, it seems to take me a long time to figure out the problem, do you have any advice about how I can streamline the diagnostic process?” I would not roll my eyes at this enterprising young cryotherapy machine repairman.
In that narrow case, my advice about not asking for advice might not apply. But there may be other contexts in which my advice about advice might be wrong, and that’s kind of the point here. Most advice can be plotted on two axes: level of insight and degree of context.1 This gives us four extremes:
Insightful in a general context
Obvious in a general context
Insightful in a specific context
Obvious in a specific context
It’s important to note that this graph is conceptual, not mathematical — you can’t really quantify advice.
The more context-specific and non-obvious the advice, the more helpful it probably is: “when you arrive at the job site, it’s best if the cryotherapy machine repair tools on your tool belt are arranged from smallest to largest, that will help you find your small tools faster.” (I have no idea if this is accurate. If anyone knows a cryotherapy machine repairperson, send them my way).
The danger zone in the middle is advice that is non-obvious enough to seem insightful without being that insightful, and the context in which it should be applied is ambiguous. Someone might give you advice that is only applicable in a specific context, but it’s ambiguous enough that people try to apply it in the wrong context. A lot of advice is like that, including the worst advice I ever received. It is to that advice that we turn next.
Bad Advice
“Listen to your platoon sergeant.”
This was the common refrain of the cadre of instructors when I was a cadet in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC).
“As a new lieutenant, you are brand new to the Army and your platoon sergeant has probably been in for a decade. You need to listen to because they what they’re talking about”
More than anything else, this is what was drilled into my head. That was over a decade ago. I wonder if cadets still get that advice.
It’s not necessarily bad advice — Platoon sergeants typically do have more experience than their brand-new lieutenants. But the verb “listen” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence: “listen to your platoon sergeant.”
When one of my sons does something he’s not supposed to do I tell him, “you need to listen to me.” Of course, I am not simply saying “son, you need to hear the words that I say.” Neither am I saying “son, you should respectfully consider my opinion when I tell you to look both ways before crossing the street.” No. What I am saying is: “you must do what I tell you.”
When my ROTC instructors told me to “Listen to your platoon sergeant” I took it to mean that the platoon sergeant would know what to do and I should do what the platoon sergeant says. Others may have understood it to mean that they should always consider the opinion of their platoon sergeant, but that they should choose the best course of action. But that nuance, if it was ever communicated, never made it through to me.
My instructors had the best intentions. In terms of blanket advice, they could have done worse. But blanket advice is not specific advice, and sometimes blanket advice that works in most contexts can fail catastrophically in other contexts. This is the danger zone from the graph above. This was the case with me and my first platoon sergeant.
If I would have had a wise mentor who knew my unique situation, his advice in my specific situation would have been to not only ignore the words of my platoon sergeant, but counsel him for every failure and marginalize his negative impact on the platoon. The platoon sergeant wasn’t stupid, he was cunning. His goal was to undermine me as much as possible to maintain the perception that he was the one who was really in charge. Listening to him was the worst thing I could have done because he wanted the best for himself, not the platoon, and certainly not me.
Ignore most advice
Most advice isn’t helpful because it either lacks insight or context. This is especially true when you have competing pieces of advice:
“Discretion is the better part of valor” v. “Fortune favors the bold.”
“Never give up” v. “know when to cut your losses.”
I always laugh whenever I hear Kenny Roger’s song “The Gambler” because the advice offered to the young man by the gambler falls directly into the danger zone of my chart (I feel like this would make a great standup bit if no one’s done this yet):
“You’ve got to know when to hold' ‘em, know when to fold ‘em”
Yeah, no kidding, Kenny. The whole point of poker is trying to figure this out. I know that I’ve got to know this, but actually knowing it is the hard part.
“Know when to walk away, and know when to run.”
Again, unhelpful.
“You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table”
Is this just an etiquette thing or are you just not supposed to be concerned about your money? If you don’t know how much money you have left, how are you supposed to know when to walk away?
The worst part here is that this “advice” was given in exchange for a the last of the young man’s whiskey. So not only was he given unhelpful advice, he had to forfeit his whiskey to get it.
So, before you ask for or follow advice, make sure it matches your context and is sufficently insightful.
Have a great week!
The idea for this graph seems common enough that someone else may have already created something similar. If you know of something similar let me know so I can give credit to the right person.
Reminds me of a pair of proverbs meant to point this out indirectly:
- Proverbs 26:4 Don’t answer a fool according to his folly, Lest you also be like him.
- Proverbs 26:5 Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own eyes.
The proverbs do not then say, "And here's how to know when to do each of these." Because the implication is that context is everything.
Great article!
>You never count your money when you’re sitting at the table
This means "avoid the sunk cost fallacy". When you're in a hand, you should play that hand to the best of your ability without worrying or gloating over how much money you have because it doesn't matter for that specific hand.
>If you don’t know how much money you have left, how are you supposed to know when to walk away?
You don't walk away when your low or high on money, you walk away when the expected value of playing more is negative. Say that you sit down for a game and you get a few lucky hands and win big, but you realize that the other people at the table are real sharks that would have eaten you alive if you hadn't gotten lucky: then you walk away. Say that you sit down for a game and you get the worst hands and lose almost everything, but you realize that the other people at the table are stooges just waiting to give you money: then you stay and play more (unless they are sharks acting like stooges, you need the skill to differentiate). There's likely a military analog: you don't stop aggression when you're at some specific high or low resource limit, you stop aggression when you're no longer expecting to win.