Advice Can Be a Dangerous Thing...

Advice is a slippery slope, and it’s important to understand how it works – and more importantly, how it can fail you. Now, that might seem like a strange thing for people like us to say, but the fact is that we’re not “advice givers,” we’re planners – advanced, trained, credentialed planners. There is an advice component to our work, but there are also math, language, emotional, and relational components of our work. You usually don’t need advice, you usually need practical, actionable information that fits your situation. So why is advice a challenge? There are a few reasons. First, “common knowledge” is often, statistically, untrue. It’s usually well-intended, but poorly researched and just not accurate. For example, if you think about the advice of “successful people” who attribute some/much of their success to taking risks, it doesn’t take into account all the people who took risks and went bankrupt, or became divorced, or whatever the negative outcome was. The idea of Survivorship Bias says that only those who were successful remain to offer advice. That’s code for, you’re not hearing from the very large sampling of people who failed at a specific endeavour. Fact: In order to really understand something, you need to hear from those who were successful AND those who weren’t. Only by looking at both can you start to identify the real causes of success and failure in a given area. The simple, enduring thought? Beware of advice, regardless of the source. You need the whole picture before you risk what matters to you.