the art of not giving advice

no, really

I walked by this sign in London while this piece was coming together— no notes!(Gymbox, 2023)

Advice is overrated!¹

Well, mostly— and maybe not for the reasons you’d think.

I take great joy in helping people I vibe with navigate difficult decisions: it’s one of my core personality traits. In personal and professional life I’ve often been told I’m great at giving advice, which for a long time slightly puzzled me because as a general matter…

…I genuinely try not to give advice at all.

At some point I realized what the disconnect was— how I’m allegedly good at something I don’t believe I’m doing— and that’s the inspiration for this post.

The short of it is that IMO helping people frame trade-offs and narratives can be incredibly valuable, while prescriptions and roadmaps almost never stick— despite how much people want them.

The most important reason (among many) is simple: in my experience, people voluntarily change only if they refuse to continue existing as they have been, and the decision to say “yeah, I’m done with this” usually hinges on a personal narrative that only they can fully know and control.

Motivation is a good first step but a squishy foundation. Refusal is rock solid.

For example, the single greatest fitness breakthrough I ever had happened in the aftermath of a tough pick-up game. I reached the limits of my patience for having an unreliable jump shot when playing basketball (which I love!) and decided to lift weights (which I do not!) as a means to stop falling off so hard as games progressed.

I had previously been on a never-ending quest of trying to find the “right” type of workout or program that didn’t feel like drudgery and found results to be inconsistent at best.

Weightlifting changed from a story of “hey! do this or get fat!” to “shooters can’t shoot if their arms turn to rubber after 20 minutes” and that made all the difference.

—

I don’t remember the exact moment when I realized virtually all classic advice has a completely contradictory counterpart and both are regularly given with a straight face, but it’s one of those things where once you notice it becomes impossible to ignore.

“never give up”

vs.

“know when to cut your losses”

“if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no”

vs.

“get out of your comfort zone”

“an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”

vs.

“just do it”

???

One-size-fits-all solutions don’t work with any consistency, yet there is so much demand for them even though good decision-making is mostly in the tailoring.

Advice is often treated like a recipe: follow these instructions and voilà, you’ll get a good outcome! Coat in flour before adding to the mix. You should move to the big city. You shouldn’t give your ex a second chance.

Personally, I believe in counsel rather than advice.

That may sound nitpicky, but I think there’s a meaningful difference— or at the very least that “advice” is an umbrella term with such strong connotations of “tell others what they should do” it’s worthwhile to embrace a narrower term that explicitly rejects that approach.

For me, counsel is about helping people map the space around the decision they’re confronting and ultimately make their own call in harmony with their preferences (not mine!) and overarching narrative.

No recipes!

At core, I focus on three specific things when offering counsel to someone important to me:

(1) Trade-Off Framing

(2) Story Framing

(3) Camaraderie

—

Trade-Off Framing

At the root of any meaningful decision is some sort of trade-off. The advice-seeker has an opportunity to gain a benefit, but doing so requires either giving up something they value or weathering pain and discomfort.

Closing doors and losing things we value feels really bad— literally irrationally so. Biases like loss aversion (humans generally value not losing a dollar at least 2x more than winning one) are crushingly influential but tough to self-diagnose when we’re in the trenches.

I’ve personally experienced and observed people I care about getting stuck in a doom loop that goes a little something like this:

• Feel excited/anxious by the potential upside of a decision (I should start a YouTube channel!)

• Consider the costs and hate them: feel fearful or dejected about how things could go wrong (What if it sucks? What will my friends and the Internet say?)

• Recoil and push off making the decision

• Feel guilty/dissatisfied about not achieving the upside, think maybe it’s time to reconsider

• 🔁

Helping people you care for map out the costs and benefits of a decision doesn’t mean prescribing a specific course of action. Yet it’s consistently one of the most influential gifts I’ve received from people I’ve reached out to for guidance. It’s also what people I care for consistently identify as among my best pieces of advice… even though they ultimately come to the conclusion themselves.

Framing trade-offs might sound robotic, but done with empathy it can actually serve a very personal purpose. It leverages two of your most valuable traits (trust from the person asking for your take + having dispassionate perspective) to help them cut through the stories in their head (more on that shortly) to really boil it down to outcomes.

Ideally, anyways.

Oftentimes, a tough decision distills to whether the person is willing to tolerate the cost of making a change. If not, the decision is kinda clear. If so, the decision is… also kinda clear.

The hard part in these cases isn’t actually the decision— deep down the advice-seeker already know what they want to do— it’s making peace with the cost they’ll have to pay, including closing the door on alternate paths.

I’m reminded of this banger from Tim Urban:

“We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands” —Tim Urban, Wait But Why

It sometimes turns out that the person you care for has locked themselves into a false binary choice and lost perspective on possible alternatives, compromises, or positive externalities. Gently helping them widen their focus can be incredibly helpful.

The nice thing about trade-offs is that they’re often pretty straightforward to outline— so naturally the next step is getting into the messy, ephemeral, and subjective.

—

Story Framing

Most of us live our lives telling stories in our heads to explain what’s happening around us, and those stories generally have a loose relationship with reality.

Have you ever felt furious about something? Grievously insulted or hurt by a thing that someone close to you did, how could they, how is this even possible, the audacity…

…and then you ate a snack?

Then felt totally calm again, and forgot what you were mad about?

Some questions to consider: Were you actually seriously wronged? Was the origin of your rage the hunger, or did eating just shore up your ability to manage the situation?

It’s jarring to realize how malleable our reality is, and how much agency we have over the narratives that define it for us. This cuts both ways. Some people can harness their narrative and become delusionally optimistic, while others end up crushed by pessimism and can’t help but want that for others as well: both are rooted in stories.

A simple example: when I was in middle school I was relentlessly bullied by a group of jocks on the football team. In high school I prided myself on not watching the NFL and took every opportunity to let people mentioning football around me know that it sucked. I had an endless stream of reasons for why the sport was bad, the NBA was superior, etc. etc.

I’m not sure any logical argument could have swayed me out of hating football.

I went to the University of Michigan for college and was legitimately unaware that the school had a football program when I got to campus.² During Welcome Week all my new friends kept hyping up their excitement for the season, so out of a sense of affectionate curiosity I bought a ticket from a guy outside the stadium and showed up for the season opener with low expectations.

Turns out my ticket was for a seat in the middle of a twenty-person seating group of long-time friends in grad school. They instantly noticed I was not one of them, but found it both endearing and hilarious that I had no idea how football worked or that Michigan even had a team when I applied. They adopted me as their mascot for the day: stress-testing my eardrums while teaching me the fight song, explaining the rules when they weren’t pounding on cowbells, joyfully chest-slamming me after touchdowns. At the end of the game they said they were jealous I was going to experience 4 more years of this and wished me the best with hugs and fist-bumps.

as it turns out, michigan does indeed have a football team

After that day I became the most hardcore college football fan I knew and didn’t miss attending a home game for the rest of college. I organized watch parties. I memorized the roster. I observed elaborate gameday rituals to ensure I didn’t jinx the team.

My high school friends and parents were deeply bemused by this 180 turnaround and asked me about it over the holiday break.

The answer was simple of course: yes I had a great first Saturday afternoon, but more importantly the story of football changed from the clubhouse of my tormentors to the inclusive cathedral of my college experience. My behavior and relationship with the sport changed with it. It’s that simple… although at the time I would have fervently denied that my middle school bullies were still living rent free in my head years later. I wasn’t ready to tackle that particular story just yet.

One thing I keep in mind when talking to people is that the story unfolding in their head about the same set of facts is likely different from mine and almost certainly colored by all kinds of dynamics I couldn’t possibly grasp given that I don’t know their life story: chips on shoulders from ancient slights, self-preservation mechanics to cope with deep wounds, a need to be the main character and hero of the story, etc.

Any gamer that’s ever seen an 0-10 teammate ranting about how their teams are the reason they’re not winning more ranked games knows that the human capacity for storytelling is limitless.

Oftentimes mapping trade-offs reveals narratives because an advice-seeker will look at the list of pros and cons, realize that on paper the decision should be clear, then find themselves struggling to make it. This triggers surprise but also recognition that there are likely other factors at play that aren’t reflected in their conscious preferences.

Changing stories and narratives is incredibly difficult in my experience, but becoming aware of them and their influence is more achievable and an important step. From there change is up to the advice-seeker, but having a map of the battlefield is a lot better than operating blind.

Offering perspective (particularly by asking good faith, non-leading questions) to set them up to understand and take control of their own narratives is in my experience a powerful outcome of taking a counsel approach rather than going for straight advice.

That may sound like advice but uh it definitely isn’t.

—

Camaraderie

Sometimes what you need most is to hear that people you identify with have struggled with similar situations, even if the terrain and season of their battle was completely different. Not feeling like the only person you know that’s gone through something is such a relief.

A sense of belonging is one of the most memorable gifts we can ever receive.

I can’t count how many times I’ve felt like a failure (story!) then heard someone I identify with say they’ve gone through something similar and immediately felt better. Time and time again I’ve found other people sharing their wins and losses to be incredibly powerful not because they offer a blueprint on what to do next but because they help me re-frame the story in my head in a way that feels honest but also heartening to me.

That said, the best can do both: offer perspectives that are easy to mine for lessons and tactics while also making you feel seen:

My attention span isn’t hopelessly broken, I need to better manage the instant gratification monkey.

Listening to my emotions doesn’t have to be incompatible with my analytical personality— they can complement each other, actually?

I’m not drifting aimlessly, I’m collecting dots that are going to connect later

I’m not a failure, I missed my first shot on goal. It’s on to the next.

And above all: I’m not alone in this.

These might sound like platitudes in a vacuum, but in context they’re everything.

After all, good advice is all in the tailoring.

—

Vibe Pairings

1. Uncle Iroh teaches a mugger how to step up his game. One of my favorite scenes from one of the best episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
   

2. The famous Rick Rubin interview where the interviewer’s brain melts as he tries to make sense of how Rubin— a legendary producer— delivers value to musicians as an advisor when he claims to have no musical ability whatsoever. Never fails to make me smile.

3. This pep talk from S2, E7 of The Bear. It’s my favorite show of 2023, and the character arc of Richie— a stubborn jerk who embraces bravado as a self-defense mechanism but inwardly wants more for himself— is done unbelievably well.

1. To be clear, I’m referring to personal advice: advice on how to change a tire, bake a cake, or navigate the promotion process at your job from a veteran aren’t the type of advice I’m talking about!

2. In my defense, I grew up in the Deep South and didn’t follow the sport. From my hazy understanding at the time, the college football world consisted of the SEC and USC.