Advice about advice
What I've learned about giving and taking advice
This post is different from the usual stuff I write. I usually curate fun little snippets and stories. You’ll continue to get those posts. This one is more of a personal essay. I tend to get a lot of advice, and a lot of people ask me for advice as well. So I just wrote a post about everything I’ve learned about giving and taking advice. If you like this post, let me know if you want to see more of this. If not, feel free to skip.
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My friend Anjan told me something I think about whenever people give me advice.
Anjan’s a jovial chap, always the center of attention, cracking jokes and making everybody laugh. Most of his jokes were focused on himself: he was a bit overweight and he made it his comedian’s prop. When he started losing weight, he even worried that he would lose his powers of humor like Chandler in Friends. Anyway, one day in office, Anjan was unusually silent. He put on a poker face, didn’t talk much, and went a whole day without cracking any jokes. He seemed perfectly healthy otherwise – it’s not like he was coming down with a fever.
At first, his friends were fidgety. They thought he was preoccupied with something. Then they asked him if everything was alright. By the end of the day, the questions were turning outright hostile – they seemed angry and annoyed that “for no good reason,” Anjan was pulling a prank on them and they insisted that he was suppressing some terrible tragedy that was deeply bothering him. I remember that day. I was one of those people who was trying to cheer him up.
Anjan later told me that it was an experiment to shake things up a bit. He knew that people cared about him, but he was trying to figure out what actually bothered them. He realized that people were more concerned with the fact that their life experience had been disrupted than that something was off with him. When he resumed talking and joking the next day, nobody investigated what had happened and pretty soon they forgot about the sudden solar eclipse of momentary moroseness.
Most advice is like this. It comes from a place of people’s discomfort with their own status quo being disrupted. This isn’t throwing shade at your friends – but it’s something you need to remember when asking for advice: The advice you get says much more about the person giving advice than it does about you.
Advice comes from a personal place
Imagine you go to your dad with the news that you’re quitting a job that seems “perfectly fine” to him on the outside. He is privy only to your interactions with him when you get home, and that you’re generally a functional human being. He might not know about your endless nights of existential wakefulness wondering whether your twenties are being invested into a vacuum, or the internal friction you feel while dealing with office politics. So his advice will come from the perspective of – “How is this going to change our life? Why rock a boat that is sailing so smoothly?” Not because he doesn’t care about your experience, but because that’s all he sees.
In the same way, when you ask your friends for relationship advice and tell them about how it’s going with that new girl (or boy) you just met, they’re going to interpret it through the lens of their own experience first: “What would I do in this situation? Based on what happened to me in the past, does this feel healthy? From what I know about my friend, does this feel like a healthy relationship?” This is the stuff that will get verbalized, so you at least have a chance to talk about it. The more subtle stuff that won’t get discussed is your friend thinking, “How will this relationship affect my dynamic with my friend? Does this sound like the sort of person who will fit into our group? Will this person change aspects of my friend that I really enjoy?”
writes about the danger of talking about relationships prematurely in his post “Looking for Alice”:When you talk about people you like, or rather when you talk about that thing that happens between you—you have to transform a highly complex impression into a string of words. Some relationships can easily be compressed into a compelling string of words. This is usually because they conform to some sort of trope of how romance should look. In my experience, great relationships are harder to compress into a sensible string of words.
And the problem is this: we are social creatures. If people look at you with a confused, or even worried, expression when you tell them about your lover, you will likely feel bad. If they start giggling and act all excited about your luck, on the other hand, you will feel a surge of affection toward your date.
Maybe your friend isn’t even aware of all this. But those dynamics are surely at play. I know because I’ve asked friends for such advice, and I’ve been that friend who gives advice as well. Admitting that my motives aren’t purely altruistic is a little hard to accept because it clashes with the way I see myself – as someone who just wants the best for his friends – while there might be more selfish motives underneath. Sometimes your core values don’t match with your friends. And sometimes you’re trying to change your values or what you aspire for (read: This excellent post on Aspiration by
) – at such times, your friends are going to be skeptical of your views even when there’s no right answer.On some level, this is fine. Your friends and family have probably known you for long enough to be attuned to what really matters to you and the ways you trip yourself up. They might be able to save you from real danger. However, we live in a time where the dangers of taking risks are overrated compared to the risks of missing opportunities by playing it safe. Your capacity to bounce back from grief is probably much higher than you imagine, but the regret of an unexplored possibility persists much longer, like white noise in the background.
Life lessons from a gangster
Here’s a really goofy example of this if you’re a movie buff. At the end of Pulp Fiction, two gangsters are sitting in a cafe discussing their future. The gangster Jules played by Samuel L Jackson says that he’s going to quit his gangster job and “walk the Earth like Caine from Kung Fu.” A cold-blooded killer is literally basing his future on a TV show that vibes with what he’s feeling at the moment. His friend Vincent (John Travolta) isn’t just amused or annoyed; he thinks Jules has lost his mind and he almost takes it as a personal insult. Which is understandable. It’s like walking into your software job on Monday to hear your office friend say he’s going to start selling teddy bears on the highway.
But Vincent’s values are so misaligned with Jules that the advice isn’t just coming from a place of concern, but also self-preservation: Vincent doesn’t want to admit the possibility that something so surreal could happen in his life. It shatters the illusion and role that he’s constructed for himself. He had certain expectations of what gangsters could and could not do, which are being challenged by Jules. Suddenly, he finds himself on wet marshland when he thought he was on firm ground.
Sometimes seemingly “good advice” can also come from a selfish place. This is what happens in Good Will Hunting, a movie about Will, a working class genius who isn’t interested in using his talents as a mathematician and instead wants to stick with his friends who do construction jobs. Will (Matt Damon) is telling Chuckie (Ben Affleck) that he’s not ashamed of having a construction job:
Will: [both leaning on a pick up truck while drinking beers and smoking cigarettes on a construction site] What do I want a way outta here for? I'm gonna live here the rest of my fuckin' life. We'll be neighbors, have little kids, take 'em to Little League up at Foley Field.
Chuckie: Look, you're my best friend, so don't take this the wrong way but, in 20 years if you're still livin' here, comin' over to my house, watchin' the Patriots games, workin' construction, I'll fuckin' kill ya. That's not a threat, that's a fact, I'll fuckin' kill ya.
This is rare. Sometimes you have friends who realize that what’s best for you isn’t what’s best for the group. Chuckie knows his friend well enough to sense that his contrarian attitude might just be the fear of losing his friends – and he’s trying to make sure that Will doesn’t cave to that fear.
But what if Will really wanted to work construction?
Is Chuckie’s advice coming from a place of wanting Will to do what’s best for him? Or does he want Will to reach heights which he and his other friends could never reach by living vicariously through Will, which also makes it about preserving his own perception and social reality? (“You don’t owe it to yourself, you owe it to me,” Chuckie tells Will).
It’s rarely a simple answer: It isn’t about whether Will needs to blindly follow Chuckie or reject his advice – it’s about whether he’s aware of these dynamics in the first place.
Un-emotional advice
When I first began telling people I was trying therapy, I expected to be criticized and judged for it. While I did get such responses, there was also unexpected curiosity: “Does it help? What do they actually do? They just sit and talk, is it?” Because I hadn’t expected these questions, I didn’t have an answer ready at that time, but I’ve been thinking about it since.
Yes, therapy is mostly just talking, answering questions, and sitting in silence with uncomfortable emotions if possible. The major difference is that your therapist doesn’t have a stake in how your life turns out. They aren’t a part of your social groups, they don’t have a stake in your career progress, and your major life decisions aren’t directly going to affect them. All they care about is whether you are able to achieve the goals that you want to work on, and because they don’t have a stake in your life, their advice is less likely to come from an emotional place while making sure you’re able to function as a healthy individual.
“Un-emotional” advice isn’t superior. It’s just different. Therapy might give you access to a perspective that you don’t get from other people who are invested in your life, which might help you see things differently. It might, not will. I don’t recommend therapy as a magic pill to people I know because I’m not sure it does work for everybody, and I don’t know what “work” means – the pace and effectiveness with which people expect results from therapy varies.
Like any other worthwhile activity, the results I got from therapy depended on the work I was willing to put in and the risks I was willing to take (emotionally). I noticed that therapy isn’t a great way to get answers, but it did help me ask better questions. My questions got more specific and tailored to my curiosity, and I was able to listen to advice from others while also staying grounded in what I valued.
Ideas for giving and taking advice
Taking advice better comes down to giving better context and asking better questions.
Giving advice better comes down to discovering context and asking better questions.
Here are some notes I found helpful on taking advice:
Explain your situation in as much detail as possible as long as the other person is curious and willing to listen. Pay attention to cues.
Ask them whether they understand your situation. If they can explain your situation and the problem you’re facing, you get to see the gaps in their understanding and fill them better. Advice that comes from incomplete understanding is useless.
Don’t ask what you should do. Ask how they would go about the situation if they were in your shoes, and try to understand why they’re making the choices they make. This gives you clarity on their values which can help you separate their personal preferences from facts, and to ask more useful questions.
e.g. “If you disagreed with your team on how to do something, how would you go about it? Oh, you wouldn’t say anything and just get the job done? Why? Because you don’t like breaking the peace. Oh, makes sense.”
Give them time to process the situation and come back to it later. Usually the best ideas take a while to pop up. Whatever advice is given on the spot is probably an honest response, but not the most well thought-out advice (When we were working on stories, my friend Guna would always chuck the first idea we discussed and ask for the “second-best idea.” Something like that).
Try writing down the advice you are planning to ask. Writing things gives shape to your assumptions, and sometimes you realize you don’t even need to ask for advice because you already know what you are supposed to do.
As much as I love the sound of my own voice, I hate giving advice. I absolutely hate it. It puts me in a position of authority when what I want to do is connect with people instead. But I do recognize that people find my thought process helpful at times, so here’s what I do when I’m asked for advice:
I ask questions. I let the other person talk as much as possible, and pay attention to body language. If their eyes are shifting around or shoulders stiffen or they sigh or talk really fast and skip over some portion, there’s probably some emotionally important information there, which is always way more useful than objective facts. So I pay attention to those and dig deeper.
I try to talk about my personal experiences instead of giving general rules. e.g If someone’s talking about feeling anxiety in a group, I’ll talk about how I felt like I was performing or acting when I was in a group and the spotlight was on me, and ask, “Does that sound familiar?” If it does, great. If not, great. I can ask more to find how their experience is different.
If I have a contradictory idea or think they are wrong, I find it more useful to ask “What makes you think that?” or “Have you thought about this?” or “Have you tried that?” instead of saying “Here’s what you should do.” I just try to be the sounding board for the other person to unravel their thoughts. (Tricks I learned from therapy :p)
Sometimes I don’t say anything and stay silent (“Hmmmmmm…” is what my friends here from me a lot of the time). People tend to discover what they really want to say in that silence, more than I expect.
I tell them I don’t know, and that I’ll think about the problem and get back to them later. There’s nothing worse than pretending I have the answer when I don’t.
I still think that most of the time, people have all the information that they need to decide the next step, and giving and taking advice is more about alignment and encouragement, rather than sharing information. But if possible, please don’t be Mr. Circlehead here:
If you have any thoughts on giving and taking advice, I’d love to hear them in the comments. If you enjoyed reading this, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks!