You want to create your own business, so you follow a popular blogger. He shares his story, including failures, of starting with Business A but not achieving the success he wanted. Then he tried Business B, with a little more success but it was still lacking.
Finally he tried Business C and, BAM, success! You should learn from his mistakes, he says. Don’t waste time with Businesses A and B, go straight to C! The profit margins are higher in Business C and it offers a better work-life balance. It’s good advice. It makes sense.
However, the blogger did not start with Business C. So he’s not talking from experience. You’re listening to him to replicate his success, but he’s advising you on a completely different path to his. He did not achieve success that way. The logic is sound, though: Why replicate the steps that didn’t work? It’s clearly good advice.
The world is full good advice. Or what sounds like it. One person says the best way to lose weight is eating Diet X. Another says Diet X doesn’t work, you need Exercise Plan Y. Anything hard has different paths, suited to different people. That’s what makes it hard.
Even people with good intentions can get it completely wrong. If a friend landed their dream job, they may try to explain how they did it. They will think of the parts that: took hard work, anyone can do, and they did recently. For example: How they searched for jobs, applied to them, prepared for interviews, and conducted themselves there. Most people don’t leave it at “I got lucky.”
But if you question them further, you may find they knew someone at the company, or the school they went to opens many doors, or they got along well with the interviewer. They didn’t mean to omit that detail, but they didn’t spend any time on it so they didn’t think about it.
To complicate things further, you can’t disentangle the person and their entire life experience from their success. I don’t mean this in a fatalistic way. It just makes no sense that someone can identify steps to repeat their success that are independent of their upbringing, personality, social circles, experience, location, and more. How would they even know that growing up with an outgoing mother helped them be more personable in interviews and significantly increased their odds of success?
So I’ve been taking advice less and less seriously over the years. Even from experts I trust and like. Instead of assuming it’s valuable, I take it as inspiration. I might include parts of it when building my own plan.
I also ask myself questions like:
Scepticism takes effort, though. So I strive to only apply this to important things like financial and health advice. If someone suggests a nearby café, I don’t have much to lose by trying it. And taking risks on small things is part of what makes life exciting.
Even knowing all this doesn’t make one immune to giving such advice. Multiple times I’ve been thinking up an explanation to how I achieved something only to catch myself, realising I had omitted a step that was completely personality based and would require extra work for someone else.
It only takes some small changes, though. Instead of:
“To lose weight you need to do X, Y, Z. That’s how I did it.”
I aim for:
“You could try X, Y, Z. They helped me. Though I’ve also heard of A, B, C.”
It’s more honest, helpful, and as a bonus: Doesn’t sound like a salesperson.