"The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases." (Carl Jung)

My advice is to take most advice with a grain of salt.

If you see advice for what it really is, this shouldn't be too controversial.

A piece of advice is simply another person's answer derived from their personal experiences.

When knowledge was scarce advice used to be more valuable. But in the age of commoditised knowledge ‒ it's become a shortcut for cognitive effort.

Advice is usually conditional on a set of implicit assumptions, derived from the extremes of sampling distributions, and subject to human biases, hidden motivations, and cultural legacies.

That's all to say that the answers to most meaningful and impactful questions are not clear cut ‒ and they never will be.

So at the very least we should apply more healthy scepticism to the advice we receive, and be overtly aware of the answers we seek.

The Sampling Problem

A lot of seemingly great consensus advice is derived from population data and appears really useful at the population level.

However, when applying this at an individual level it makes more sense to use an appropriate level of scepticism and view consensus as the generally applicable baseline, rather than your perfect solution.

This is because your situation is probably very different to this amalgamation of our population. By it's nature this type of advice will lead you to the median outcome (although this may not be a bad thing).

If you're aiming for a right tail outcome it can be better to use spiky advice that is either totally wrong or non-obviously but importantly right.

The Human Nature Problem

The drive to seek and accept consensus is a deeply rooted evolutionary artefact within our psyche. For thousands of years, before writing and effective record-keeping, our species relied on storytelling and social consensus to transfer the knowledge required to survive.

This cognitive wiring has created an evolutionary mismatch. Our minds, adapted for the relatively stable environments of the past, instinctively equate consensus with safety. This makes us deeply susceptible to social proof and authority bias. It feels safer and requires far less cognitive effort to agree with the 'tribe' or a perceived leader than to risk social exclusion, which for our ancestors was a death sentence.

As a result, we're biologically and psychologically predisposed to accept advice from others, even when their context is irrelevant. The very act of uncritical acceptance stops us from asking the right questions in the first place.

The Bias Problem

By my definition, every piece of advice is biased. Even if the person giving advice tries their best, there are always underlying structural factors that you can't really adjust for, leading to a conscious or unconscious adoption of their biases, beliefs and agendas.

It's also often true that the 'correct' answer for one period of time will be different for another period of time, even for the same set of circumstances.

The Identification Problem

Typically the most useful advice is tied to things that don't really change, like simple systems or constants.

The most dangerous advice is from people who are mimetically successful but not where you specifically want to be. This is because their answers are harder to objectively dismiss despite being irrelevant to you.

Niche 'n of 1' advice from those who are where you aspire to be can be less dangerous and more useful when applied at the individual level.

But it's easy to forget the unique factors that enabled their answer to work at the time. Even if they came from the exact same place as you, it's still worth at least considering how this advice might differ because of how the world has changed.

As my friend Alex Theodore puts it, the best advice comes from someone who has done the thing you're trying to do and has helped multiple people also do it. [1]

How To Use Advice

Advice can still be really useful.

But I think you need to be a student of your own mind, body, and the world more broadly to arrive at the appropriate answer for your question.

Today we're obsessed with answers and rarely stop to think if we're even asking the right question.

We're been cursed with the blessing of abundant information. The internet enabled effective knowledge sharing at scale. Now accelerated by AI, we've been conditioned to take the path of least resistance instead of investing the cognitive effort to actually reason for ourselves ('just google it/ask ChatGPT').

With the commoditisation of most knowledge, more of our time should be spent on uncovering the right questions to ask.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” (Albert Einstein)

A useful contrarian exercise I've found is to take the complete opposite of the generally accepted consensus, and break it apart to see what really does and doesn’t apply for your situation. This can help identify hidden alpha, differentiators, and competitive advantages that others aren’t aware of.

Starting from the consensus baseline can also be a good strategy, where you can then iteratively adjust variables and test for effectiveness. Although when truly innovating, sometimes it’s best to start from first principles so as to avoid inheriting prior biases. The clear trade-off here is time, but the potential payoff can outweigh that cost.

Sharing this view on the consensus can cause people to be defensive and respond combatively. But if someone is so married to a certain point of view without being open to the possibility that something else can be true, it's probably the wrong person to be speaking with.

What's My Advice?

There's a balance to be reached between reinventing the wheel and adopting consensus advice. Consensus is convenient, useful, and safe. But the best answers to the most important questions almost always arise from instinctually finding your own way.

Footnotes

[1] Here's Alex's full hierarchy of 'advisors', from worst to best:
1. Random aunty at BBQ (sometimes they put out some bangers ngl)
2. Someone who's trying to do what you want to do
3. Someone who's done the thing but doesn't understand how
4. Someone who's done the thing, knows how, but hasn't helped anyone else do it
5. Someone who's done the thing you're trying to do and has helped multiple people also do it