Advice on Advice: A Framework For Evaluating Advice

[Crossposted from my Substack]

Introduction

Advice is important. After all, you do not know everything, often there is a lot of uncertainty, and there may be things you never considered at all. Advice can help you solve a problem, or to make better decisions. 

But not all advice is equal, and not all advice should be followed. So how can you tell whether (or how much) you should follow a certain piece of advice? 

Should I follow this advice? 

In a sentence: you should be cautious about following most advice. 

In a few: a lot of advice has certain underlying assumptions to it, for example based on the person’s impression of your background or overgeneralising their own. There might also be things that the advice giver has not considered, or there might be key information that is unknown, or there might simply be various incentives or emotions involved. So listen to it, yes, but you need to judge how much it applies to you and your situation, and decide whether and how much to follow it. 

For me, I’ve found it most useful to work out why certain advice was given, or why someone thinks I or someone else should do that thing. That way you can work out what some of the assumptions are, what resources might be needed (and whether you have these), and how much it is likely to apply to you. You may also find the reasoning very useful, but based on it and your own knowledge, circumstances and goals draw a different conclusion. 

Some specific things to think about: 

• Awareness: do they know my situation, and what assumptions are they making?
• Experience: do they have experience in or knowledge of a comparable situation?
• Intention: why are they giving me the advice, and what are their intentions?

How much time you spend evaluating advice should depend on the importance and potential consequences of what you are getting input on. For small decisions with no real consequences, then very little or even no evaluation may be needed, whereas for major life decisions like career changes thoroughly evaluating advice you receive becomes much more important. 

But of course each of these questions is very broad, and there are many nuances involved and things you should think about. For example: 

For awareness, think about what information they have, both before you go to them for advice and how you frame it. Someone’s interpretation of the situation and therefore also of their advice can be influenced significantly by what information you give them or even the words and framing you use to describe the situation. There may also be factors at play that they are not aware of, but you cannot explain to them as you are not aware of them either. For cases of one-to-many communication (e.g. someone giving a talk on career advice, articles online) think about the target audience of the piece and what assumptions they are likely to be making about the listener/reader. 

For experience, think about how you would assess this. Sometimes it is difficult to tell how much experience someone has, sometimes you can get an idea from public information of their past work, and sometimes you can tell from the ‘why’. Depending on what you are getting advice on, this can matter more or less: experience can lead to more useful advice, but also to bias. Experienced overall does not mean their experience matches up with the specific thing you want advice on. For example, a senior professional may have a lot of useful advice about what is important to work on in a field (or at least their subpart of the field), but less useful or out of date advice on how to get there to begin with having not experienced the early-career job hunt in decades. Sometimes, people newer to a field can offer valuable perspectives because they are less constrained by how things are meant to work and therefore offer new, innovative solutions. 

For intention, think about not only if they are trying to be helpful, but if they are in the right frame of mind to be helpful. What emotions might they be feeling when giving this advice? What do they believe the ideal outcome is, whether or not they think this is what you think the ideal outcome is? At the same time, make sure you are not assessing intention from communication style alone, as styles and norms vary across cultures, and factors like neurodiversity may affect how people convey their thoughts. I would say try to assume good intentions in most cases, particularly if you are following the other steps and critically assessing the advice anyway. 

To give a brief example of how this might apply, let’s say someone gives you the advice to 'quit your job and follow your passion.’ You might consider things like:

• Awareness: Do they know my responsibilities and financial situation?
• Experience: Have they successfully made a similar transition themselves?
• Intention: Are they suggesting this based on my goals or their values?

Even as you evaluate these factors, your own emotions will also influence how you receive advice. For example, if you are anxious, desperate, or overwhelmed, you might be more likely to accept advice without working out how much it applies to you. On the other hand, if you're defensive, insecure or frustrated, you might dismiss valuable insights. Be sure also to evaluate advice that makes you feel very positive, for example if you want it to be true, as you feeling positive about the advice alone does not mean it is good advice. Try to recognise how you feel when you receive the advice, and how this might be affecting how you interpret it. Being mindful of both your own emotional response and the perspective of the person giving you advice allows you to evaluate the advice in a fair and balanced way. 

Remember: While you critically assess advice, it’s important to appreciate that someone has taken the time to help you. Practicing gratitude doesn't mean following advice blindly. You can value someone's input while still determining how much it applies to your specific situation.

The considerations above can help you evaluate advice for a given situation. However, you should also consider the broader context: the path you've taken and the goal you're heading towards, which may be significantly different to what the person giving you advice expects.

Where are you coming from, and where are you going? 

Advice is likely to apply to you less if the expectations of your background and goals are different to your actual background and goals. This is more likely to be true if you are trying to do something different (it may be difficult to get good advice if you are a trailblazer) or are from a less represented or non-standard background (it may be difficult to get good advice if you have taken a non-standard career path). People may not be aware of their default expectations. 

Some examples of how both background and goals can affect what advice is given and how applicable it is:

Background: 

• Knowing certain things (which have nothing to do with a certain task) might still be seen as a sign of intelligence and accordingly competence, whereas what might instead be being measured is a shared educational background. If this leads to you being seen as less intelligent than you actually are, this may lead to you being advised to set less ambitious goals.
• Factors such as gender, nationality or socioeconomic class might influence which approaches or career paths are suggested, regardless of individual skills or interests. This may lead to potentially better-suited options being missed.
• People, particularly from well off backgrounds, may assume high starting levels of resources. The most obvious one is money, but other resources such as social support and access to networks are also significant. If you have fewer of these than other people or than what they assume, advice you are given might not (currently) be possible for you to actually do. This does not mean you should abandon ambitious goals, but rather that you might need to adapt some of the advice you receive or to take a different approach. 

Goals:

• If your goal is something that a lot of people aim to do (e.g. getting rich), there will likely be a lot of books, articles, people on the internet etc telling you how you should do the thing. There probably is good advice for this specific thing that exists somewhere, albeit hidden under a lot of other bad, out of date or overgeneralised information.
• If you are trying to do something that few people aim to do, people may be more likely to question why you are doing it and some of those questions may be framed as advice. For example, optimising your career for the largest positive impact rather than a high salary is a less common ambition, and a lot of career advice is not framed in this way. Some people may even question why this is your ambition at all.
• If you are trying to do something that has not been done before (e.g. invent a transformative technology, start a new movement), specific advice in that specific area is less likely to directly apply. However there are certainly patterns that might apply, e.g. related industries, or general things that are robustly good or robustly bad (don’t run out of resources is a pretty good one). The default expectation will most likely not be that you are in this category unless you explicitly tell people, and some of them may think you are insane. 

These examples highlight another important question to ask yourself that spans across our framework: 

• Outcome: Would this advice help me achieve my goals, or different goals? 

This fits in with awareness (do they know what your goals are?), experience (are they familiar with paths to your specific goal?), and intention (are they trying to guide you toward the outcome you want or one they prefer?). When there is misalignment on the ideal outcome, even well-intentioned advice may not help you reach your goal. 

Great, so what next? Now you have to take action, and that means choosing which advice to follow and how much to follow it.

Even well-intentioned advice from experienced people who have good awareness of your situation may vary in usefulness. You may still receive conflicting advice. Sometimes this might be about what broad things you should do, e.g. you will likely receive a lot of different answers if you ask about what field you should go into for your career. Other times, advice givers may agree on the outcome, such as it being useful to grow your network more within a given field, but have different opinions of which approach works best to do this. Another challenge might be that you receive a lot of valuable, complementary advice, but you then need to work out how to prioritise it. Some advice may be particularly helpful if it is done sooner, whereas other advice may be lower priority and ‘nice to have’ if you have spare capacity. 

Sometimes you may be able to prioritise advice fairly easily based on your values, or certain actions may clearly have a larger benefit relative to the amount of effort needed than others. Other times it may be less obvious, and you should think about what cheap or easy steps you might be able to take to work out how to prioritise it, or whether there are alternatives that might give similar benefits but at lower costs. For example you might take a relevant course before deciding on a new career direction, or you may be able to find a remote role rather than moving to a new country.

However, if the advice is impossible or difficult for you to apply, or would have required you to take different past actions, that might be an indication that you should question how much awareness they have of your situation, whether their experience may be out of date, or what their intentions might be and whether these are driven by their emotions.

This brings us to an important practical question:

• Utility: Which parts of this advice can I apply, and how should I go about applying it?

And as always, remember to ask why. Their reasoning could be very useful to you, even if their conclusion is less so.

But what happens when your situation grows particularly difficult?

When things go badly wrong it is difficult to give good advice

Advice may be particularly difficult to give well in difficult situations, particularly crisis situations. What constitutes a crisis is different from person to person, but this may include situations like job losses, health issues, or family emergencies. Getting good advice becomes more important when you are trying to get out of a difficult situation, yet at the same time it is more difficult to get good advice, and following bad or misleading advice can be more harmful when in a vulnerable position. Being aware of some of the challenges of both giving and receiving advice during crisis situations can help you work out when this is happening, and therefore better interpret the advice. 

Giving good advice becomes more difficult in crisis situations, for example:

• All the nuances about why advice might be less relevant for you still apply, but people are even less likely to know your specific situation or have experience of comparable situations
• People may become more cautious or overly risk-averse in the advice they give, particularly if they believe you will follow this advice blindly, as they do not want to make a bad situation worse
• Giving good advice (both working out what would be helpful, and communicating it in a way that is) would require both time and a lot of emotional bandwidth, which people may not be able to do even if they want to help

Outcome alignment might become even more difficult, as the advice may become (or appear to become) more about getting out of the bad situation than getting into a good one, which may be linked with the risk-aversion point above. You likely also have far fewer resources available, which means that there are fewer actionable steps that you are able to take to apply the advice. 

Emotions heavily influence both giving advice, and also your interpretation when receiving advice, in difficult times. Some examples of ways it may influence the advice you are given: 

• Sympathy may lead to them wanting to reassure you or give you advice relating to your wellbeing
• Discomfort might lead them to be uncomfortable recommending certain things if it seems like you are already struggling
• Guilt might be involved particularly if you went to this person for advice in the past, and they feel this might have contributed to your current situation
• Distress might bias advice if it reminds them of when they themselves were in a bad situation
• Superiority or judgement might influence advice if they believe (rightly or wrongly) they would never end up in such a situation themselves

Emotions may also affect your interpretation of the advice. For example, when you're stressed or in crisis, it may be easier to follow advice uncritically because you want it to be true, or you do not have time, energy or capacity to properly assess it. You may be drawn to advice that offers immediate comfort rather than long-term solutions, or you may be overwhelmed by contradictory advice or inputs. Being aware of this and recognising these emotions both in yourself and others can help you assess and usefully apply the advice you are given. 

So how do you approach advice during difficult times?

My best guess is that the main framework still applies, but with additional considerations: 

• As with any advice, assess awareness, experience and intention, but be aware that there are many factors that make this more difficult in crisis situations
• Generally assume good intentions, but know that emotions or other factors might affect the usefulness of the advice and your interpretation of it
• Appreciate solicited advice, but be more selective about unsolicited advice

Again, you may find the reasoning that goes into the advice useful while disagreeing with the conclusion, and therefore drawing a different conclusion. However, this requires evaluation, and when your mental and emotional capacity is limited, it may make sense to be more selective about which advice you fully evaluate. For unsolicited advice in particular, it may be difficult to work out why someone is giving you this advice (particularly if given without them first asking you if you would like advice), so it may be reasonable to decide not to listen to much or even all of it. 

Managing these considerations during difficult times is challenging, but having a framework for evaluating advice can provide clarity when you need it most. While seeking support is important during crises, focusing on quality rather than quantity of advice can help preserve your limited emotional resources. Familiarising yourself with these considerations beforehand can help you to recognize some potential issues even when your mental bandwidth is limited. The best time to think about this is before you need to. 

Conclusion

Advice is important and can help you make better decisions. But all advice has assumptions, and specific advice might be more or less helpful for your situation. Understanding what they know about your circumstances and goals, what their experience is, and why they're giving it can help you figure out how likely they are to be able to give you good advice. Then, considering specifically how much the advice aligns with your goals and how high priority it is given your particular situation, can help you decide whether and how much to implement it. 

As an example to close, let’s apply this framework to the article you are reading right now: 

• Awareness: Specific situations are all different, but I believe this advice is pretty high level (meta really) and generally applicable.
• Experience: This is how I approach interpreting and taking action after receiving advice, based on what has gone well and less well from past experience. Which means both that I am betting on this being broadly correct… and that there will be parts of it that I do not agree with in 5 years (or even 5 months??).
• Intention: I initially created this framework as part of an article I'm working on about recovering when risks don't pay off. I realised that during challenging times it can be particularly difficult to look at advice critically and work out what to do based on it, but also particularly important to do so well as the consequences of getting this wrong are likely to be higher. This then seemed important enough to turn into its own post.

So what is the conclusion? How much should you follow my advice on advice? That is up to you. My hope isn’t that you agree with everything here, or that you follow it exactly, but that this acts as a starting point. If this helps you think more critically about the next piece of advice that you receive, then this has served its purpose. 

With thanks to everyone who reviewed and left feedback on a draft of this article, including Catherine Low and Dylan Balfour for their useful comments. All mistakes are my own.