Not all advice is good advice. Daphne E. Jones, the ex-SVP and Chief Information Officer of GE Healthcare, once framed this perfectly:
“When you’re offered advice, take the meat but not the bones.” - Daphne E. Jones
Anytime someone offers you a piece of advice, imagine you’re being offered a delicious piece of chicken.
Thank you very much, you might say - that’s fantastic. The problem is, sometimes what they’re offering you is a lean chicken breast, and at other times it’s a few scraps of gristly meat around a gnarly bone.
Sometimes you see the bone sticking out and quickly assume there’s no meat, discarding the advice assuming it doesn’t apply to you—that it’s not useful and there’s no value you can extract. On plenty of occasions that would be a mistake. It can still be worth giving it a chew and making sure you get everything you can out of it.
But the more common situation is the opposite. You’re offered a plate of advice that looks succulent and well-seasoned. It’s coming from someone you respect and admire, and you can see how much they’ve achieved. The problem is, if you swallow it whole without processing it thoroughly, a small bone could get lodged in your neck.
The lesson? Chew your food.
Advice is abstract
It’s common to mistake ‘advice’ for ‘truth’. It’s not. I expand on this in Decision Hacker, and touch on it briefly in this post.
Advice is inherently subjective - but more importantly, it’s an abstraction. The closest you could get to the full truth would be to live through the advice-giver's memories using a VR simulacrum, or Dumbledore’s pensieve.
For any experience to be passed on and shared, it has to be boiled down into an abstraction.
This means that whenever someone gives you their advice, they’re either boiling down an experience they’ve had, or a series of experiences they’ve gathered from themselves and others, and condensing it into a single takeaway.
But how do you know whether the advice is useful?
There are four barriers you'll have to be careful of, which determine how useful abstracted advice can be:
- Legibility - how accurate is the person's recollection of the situation their advice is based on? The accounts of first-hand witnesses are famously flawed. Sometimes what we remember isn't exactly what happened.
- Fidelity - how much information is missing from the recording? The facts they recall may be accurate, but are they complete? Are they fully aware of all the variables that resulted in the outcome they’re referencing?
- Composability - how well can the person translate the information they have into a generalizable takeaway? i.e. did they learn the right lesson(s)? Are they biased to interpret things in a particular way?
- Pattern matching - assuming the information you get is accurate, complete, and faithfully interpreted, how easily can you map the advice you’re getting to your own situation?
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