Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Ali Hale.
Good advice can ruin your project, your relationships, and even your life.
Just think of the times when you tried a piece of advice which actually made things worse.
Perhaps you followed some financial guru’s recommendation, only to lose money and end up even more in debt.
Maybe you listened to your best friend’s views on child discipline (even though he doesn’t have any kids of his own), and it led to a massive screaming match before school.
Or – most common of all – you took advice from your parents, careers counsellor and teachers, and studied Law, even though you hated it and really wanted to major in English Literature.
Even when it’s not disastrous, good advice can be a huge waste of time. Here’s how to sort the “good” from the really good.
Test #1: Is It Aimed at You?
Some advice is perfectly sound, but it’s not aimed at you.
Traditional time management advice, for instance, isn’t generally aimed at creatives. Most systems don’t acknowledge that you have regular peaks and troughs of creative energy. They don’t take into account inspiration and motivation.
If your to-do list system just isn’t working for you, there’s probably nothing wrong with you or the system. It just wasn’t created with you in mind.
Don’t be afraid to ditch advice that’s aimed at someone else. Tips aimed at stay-at-home moms won’t help if you’re a single, self-employed freelancer. Tried-and-tested methods for executives who spent all their time on the phone won’t help you manage your inbox.
Test #2: Will it Work For You?
Last Spring, my creative writing teacher Pam Johnson was encouraging our class to try out writing for 20 minutes every day, to get into a strong writing habit.
While I could certainly find 20 minutes every day to write, I knew I wouldn’t find it a helpful practice. In our group email, I wrote:
I’m resistant to [writing daily], because I tried it last year and wrote 500, religiously, every single day, from 1st January through till late March. (It was a new years’ resolution…) I stopped because I was losing the joy of writing and it felt like yet another item on my to-do list. I found that it took me most of those 500 words just to really “be there” (which I was calling “flow” or “the zone” before). So now I write two or three times a week for much longer, usually 3000-4000 words, and that seems to suit me best.
I do think about my novel every day! 😉
It took guts for me to write that (I like Pam and learnt a huge amount from her) – but I knew that, while “write daily” was good advice and aimed squarely at student writers, it wasn’t right for me.
How do you know if advice will work for you? If you’re not sure, I’d say try it out. But if you’ve tried something similar in the past and it didn’t work, it’s probably a piece of advice you can safely ignore.
Test #3: Is the Source Reliable?
Lots of people will jump at the chance to give you good advice. They’re usually well-meaning. The problem is, they’re not necessarily well-informed.
My mother still tells the story about going to a “how to parent” talk at a Christian conference. At the time, she had three small children, and was interested to pick up some new ideas.
The speaker had no kids of his own (and no particular experience in looking after them).
My siblings and I grew up just fine, and my mother has always been a fantastic influence in my life – quite possibly despite the “good advice” she was given.
There’s no one measure of a reliable source, but you can check out:
- Their credentials. These might be experiential (“I’ve brought up five kids”) rather than academic (“I have a degree in child psychology), but they should exist.
- What other people say. Ask friends, or look for testimonials or reviews from others.
- Their success. What Darren Rowse says about blogging is worth listening to, but you can probably ignore Joe Newbie (whose blog is read by his dad and his cat).
Test #4: Is it Flexible?
Truly great advice rarely requires you to follow an exact procedure to the letter. Great advice still has room for you.
Some techniques are, obviously, more open to modification than others – but any advice you’re going to use should allow you space to tweak it to suit you.
One of the best ways to implement good advice is to draw on lots of different sources. Pick various people’s brains. Read several books by several authors. Put together a solution which is as unique as you are.
There Are People Who Do Offer Genuinely Good Advice
I learned a lot on the importance of flexibility, in particular, from Thursday Bram when we started planning our Creativity Toolbox.
Thursday rightly emphasized that no two creatives have quite the same process, and we came up with the “Toolbox” name to show that we were offering lots of different tools, not one rigid method.
Well-meaning people give “good advice” all the time, but the difference between genuinely good advice and well-meaning advice is whether the advice helps you do what you’re trying to do. If some “good advice” isn’t working for you, it’s not good advice.
What “good advice” have you tried to follow in the past? How did it work out?
Thanks for the great advice on not taking great advice lol. You are right though about the advice being more about the person giving it than recieving it. In the past I’ve followed bad advice over my own instincts and regreted it. Great post!!
Cheers, Dandy!
Thanks for the really solid points Ali.
The first test has been an especially important one for me. I’ve been given some really great advice that totally doesn’t fit who I am and what I do.
And I’ve also found that when it’s not a good fit for me, it’s usually not a good fit for my audience either.
So trying to do something that’s a bad fit for me and a bad fit for my audience is never going to lead anywhere good. I just end up alienated from me and my people.
Thanks, Fabeku — I’ve found the same with some advice, particularly about blogging (I don’t post every day, nor do I generally write posts much under 1000 words … because the longer, in depth stuff works for me and my people).
Hey Ali,
First off, thanks to Charlie for inviting you, once again, to guest post and thanks to you for your contribution.
Ah yes, it takes immense belief in your own judgement to listen and pay attention to the “still,small voice” that is your conscience.
Your intuition whispers. In a world of shouters, it can be drowned out.
Aggression is over-rated in our society.
What matters often is more nuanced than conventional society would have us believe.
Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was famous for his daily, early morning prayers.
Gandhi would meditate within to drown out the advice he received from all and sundry, which could be debilitating.
Inevitably, the Mahatma would receive divine guidance and take action based on it. That self-belief enabled him to move forward and make great strides in his political career and social life.
Thus, your message has hit home. It is a timely piece too in a world gone crazy sending us mixed messages.
How boring and insane a world it would be if all of us were doctors, lawyers, engineers, accountants and MBA types.
After all, we also need creatives like our very own Ali Hale and Charlie. Cheers!
P.S. Hope you have by now recovered from that mean-spirited “Delhi Belly” and are feeling a whole lot better.
Best wishes, as always, and regards.
Thanks Archan! Yep, I’m fine now — though currently in Vegas (for BlogWorld, I hasten to add) and very jetlagged!
I’ve been slowly learning the importance of listening to my intuition — even when advice is very well intentioned, it can still be totally wrong for me.
Good advice I’ve followed with disastrous consequences include:
Take naps. Good advice, I’m sure, works for many people apparently, but they just knock me out. I never quite wake up for the rest of the day. And then that night I can’t sleep. And then the next morning I can’t wake up. And everything is ruined forever.
The pomodoro method. I keep circling back around to it because lots of people do recommend it, and I do get stuff done when I use it. It’s just that the hangover is not worth it. I get stuff done and feel exhaused and miserable. Good advice, wrong for me.
Thanks for sharing those, Willie — naps work ok for me, but my husband finds just the same as you — they make him groggy and screw up his sleep, sometimes for days.
I’ve never tried the pomodoro method, perhaps because I always had a big “Hmmmmmm not me” when I looked at it. So I’m thinking maybe I was right on that one, from what you’ve said…
Loved this. Most people are quick to launch advice that comes from their own programming. As a result, it’s often not personal to us. People who proffer advice need to constantly practice listening and questioning skills – that is, if they really care.
Charlie, I always love the tone of your writing. And you are right in your points about what constitutes “good” advice. We all need to consider the source and decide if it is right for us at that time. Thanks!
I’m actually Ali (guest posting!) – but glad you liked the piece, and flattered to be mistaken for Charlie! 🙂
Thanks for this, Ali.
Being open to new ideas and embracing new techniques is essential to growth, but it’s easy to forget that not all the advice we hear is right for us. It’s then possible to feel like a failure when our favorite guru’s techniques don’t work for us. On the flip side, it’s glorious to stumble across new advice that really resonates and seems designed for our own mindset. If we trust our gut, we can usually tell the difference.
Cheers, Ren! Yep, I agree it’s tough when good advice from someone awesome just doesn’t seem to work … but it’s rarely that someone’s “wrong”, just that different folks are wired differently.
I did a classic listen-to-everyone-else and got a degree in Engineering that I hardly used. Fortunately, a few years after graduation I found a career path that suited me a lot better. It’s too bad we send kids off to college right after high school, before they have any taste of working for a living.
I agree – and in fact, I’d go further and say that high school itself isn’t generally a great preparation for the world. Maybe we need to rethink whether kids should be there in the first place…
(Also, my take on college isn’t so much that it should lead directly to a career path – more that it should be a chance for young people to grow, expand their horizons, and learn about something they love for its own sake.)
This is a great post Ali. The most important lesson I’ve learned in life is that other people give bad advice. I find that most people fail on Test number 1 – they give advice based on their own experiences or what they want for you, rather than what you want for yourself.
These days I never ask for advice. I ask people to tell me how they accomplished what they accomplished, what they struggled with and what was the most important lesson they learned, and then I measure that experience against my own and take from it anything I think I can use.
I’m a photographer, a writer and a yoga teacher. Ask any one of those groups and they will tell you to practice every day but that’s just not feasible for me because I want to do all of them. So I have to find my own way instead, which is really much better.
Thanks, Nicola. I like your method — we can learn a lot from other people’s stories. It sounds like you’re almost getting mini case studies there.
I think the “practice every day” advice works for some folks and not others; frankly, I can’t see why it matters how often you do something, so long as you’re getting the results you want overall!