
What to do with too much advice - akharris
https://blog.ycombinator.com/what-to-do-with-too-much-advice
======
a_d
There a lot of great points on this thread. We need more distinction between
contextual and non-contextual advice. If one is ‘at the board’ working through
a problem — then a hint or solution, moves the problem forward. On the other
hand, if one is just ‘leisurely browsing advice listicles’ without being at
the board, facing the problem, then most likely you are just ingesting
dopamine-flavored noise.

Advice without context from anyone — whether it is PG, pmarca or Richard
Feynman or {_your_fav_successful_survivor_} - would be useless, unless you are
working/thinking about the problem that they are giving solutions for. Help
only works if you are looking for something. Also sometimes it is good to just
enjoy problem-solving and figuring things out. We are too quick to look for
advice — and I get why: because no one wants to “reinvent the wheel”; There
are too many standardized administrative things with startups that can be just
solved by looking up advice; no problem with that; but sometimes it is worth
struggling through a problem even though geniuses like PG and pmarca can give
a solution quickly.

Abundant capital has led to too many VCs with too many blog posts looking to
differentiate with their advice, under the guise of differentiation, content
marketing, “proprietary deal flow” etc. If content is “bait” then you are at
the bad end of the line.

When faced with a problem, find someone who can help — All other times, just
do the work and enjoy problems :-)

(Did I just give advice? Can’t tell)

~~~
vorpalhex
> most likely you are just ingesting dopamine-flavored noise.

I hope you don't mind if I steal that phrase. Well put.

------
citilife
I think the single most important thing I've learned in my career, for my
startup, and for my life is that I'm the only one responsible.

The fact is, everyone can give you advice, it's cheap. However, it's only
based off their experience and their responsibility. You can never have too
much advice, you just have to see how similar the situation is to see if it's
useful.

What exemplified this in my mind, was when I received advice to not go down a
particular path with my technical architecture. Yet, 6 months down the line,
the architecture works very well, and that same "advisor" has since changed
their mind.

Because it's only based off personal experience, and no one can experience
things that haven't happened, it's worth weighting advice based on a
situation-by-situation basis.

~~~
rckclmbr
Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those that supply it.
Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the last from
the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it
for more than its worth.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
You should at least credit Baz Luhrmann if you're going to quote that. At
least put it in quotes so it doesn't look like you're trying to take credit
for it.

~~~
rckclmbr
It was actually mary schmich, but i thought the song was universally known at
this point.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Huh! TIL!

------
DoreenMichele
_For a founder, this means picking a single adviser who can inform your
thinking, rather than someone who makes decisions for you._

I would call this a _sounding board_. A good sounding board is really
valuable. It should be someone you trust, like talking with and communicate
well with. They don't necessarily need to know your problem space all that
well.

I often serve as a sounding board for my 31 year old son. He talks a lot, I
occasionally comment on something he said and he walks away with a valuable
insight on where to go next. I'm not even in a position to give advice per se
because I don't really know what he's talking about. But even in the course of
trying to understand what he is saying, I can ask questions that help clarify
something in his mind.

I'm really not a big fan of either getting nor giving advice. I try to get
people to engage me in discussion in a meaty way, but advice per se presumes
one person knows what is best for another and I think that is generally not
true. The person seeking advice typically has "local" information that simply
never really gets shared and this means the person giving advice is frequently
doing so without knowledge critical to the decision-making process.

When I was raising my kids, I operated on the assumption that they knew a
bajillion things about their little world that I would never know -- if they
were hot, if their tummy hurt but they were too young to communicate it, etc
-- but I knew a lot more about life, the universe and everything generally. I
tried to bridge the gap between my larger knowledge base and their smaller one
for the problem space in question while leaving as much decision-making in
their hands as possible.

So, for example, the summer my oldest turned two and we got a hand-me-down
winter coat in the mail that perfectly matched his new shoes and he was
enamored that they matched and wanted to wear them together, I didn't tell him
"No, you can't wear a winter coat in summer." (It was Germany and it was
fairly cool that summer anyway.) Instead, I told him "Don't put the hood on
and don't zip it closed. Half your heat escapes from your head. If you leave
the hood off, you should be okay." And he then put the hood on and off a dozen
times to test what he had just been told.

Because of this incident, years later in elementary school in Kansas -- which
was colder than Germany -- he was better at keeping himself warm while playing
outside in winter than his classmates. He was typically the last child still
outside for recess. Everyone else went in before recess was over because they
were too cold.

------
aaavl2821
The idea that it's better to just do something quickly and learn from
mistakes, rather than take your time, get a lot of good advice, and do it
right, seems very accepted but I think it is not always generalizable. In
particular, in biotech the cost of a failed experiment is much higher and one
poorly designed experiment can kill a company. It's best to get an advisory
board with relevant yet diverse experiences to really dig through the details
of the experimental design and critically think about what you do and don't
know about the biology

I know a few biotech founders who have the tech startup mindset of just
getting some money and rushing into an experiment, except they need $200k and
6 months for that experiment. If you realize three months in when it's too
late to stop that one of your assumptions was wrong, or you used the wrong
model, that's a terrible feeling

~~~
akharris
There's certainly a significant amount of context dependence on the amount of
advice that's "right" for any given situation. I think the important thing is
to make sure you know that there is an "enough" rather than endlessly chase
more.

~~~
everythingswan
Well put.

There's probably a theory that better explains this, but I think of it as
getting to 60%. How can I get to 60% certainty without wasting too much time?

I'll never get to 100% (likely not even the 60% I think I am getting to) but
how can I uncover just enough information to feel confidence in my decision?
(edit: to add the "?")

The rest is just assessing past decisions and asking the same questions until
we get satisfied with the result.

------
Alex3917
Advice is sort of the first derivative of what you should be making decisions
based off, i.e.:

\- How have people solved similar problems in the past? How have things gone
wrong for people facing similar issues?

\- How is the world different now? How is the world going to look in five and
ten years?

IMHO advice is only useful to the extent that you can deconstruct the thought
process behind it.

------
staunch
Paul Bucheit nailed the problem: _" Limited life experience + over-
generalization = advice"_. Most startup advice is horroscope-like in its
applicability and utility. It's very easy for advice to seem entirely right
but be entirely wrong. Having a single teacher is no answer to this problem.

The solution is to have a single "anchor" or goal that all incoming advice is
supposed to serve.

For standup comedians there's a great anchor: make people laugh. If crowds
laughs at a comedian's routine, they're succeeding. If crowds don't laugh,
they're failing.

Paul Graham described the founder's anchor: make something people want. If
users are using a startup's product, it's succeeding. If people are not using
it, it's failing.

This eliminates most (but not all) room for self-delusion and misjudgment. All
advice for comedians should serve them in "making people laugh" and all
startup advice should serve founders in "making something people want".

A comedian can ask: "How will this advice help me make more people laugh, or
how will it make people laugh more?"

A founder can ask: "How will this advice help me make more people want our
product, or how will it make people want it more?"

And then its their responsibility to judge which course of action will best
further their goal.

------
dbelchamber
I suppose the essence of being an entrepreneur is being the one to make
decisions no one else has made. It seems to be helpful to be data informed
with your decisions, but I suppose the moral of this article is that advice
can only help with general rules of thumb. In order to solve specific problems
that haven't been solved before, you have to carve your own path with your own
decisions.

------
lasermike026
Richard Feynman, "DISREGARD!"

[http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/563/2/Goodstein.pdf](http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/563/2/Goodstein.pdf)
(End of page 20 and beginning of page 21.)

------
e40
The truth about advice: advice is always flawed because the person giving it
doesn't have to live with the consequences. That alone should make you take
any advice with a grain of salt.

------
JunaidBhai
We faced the same issue before pivoting our design services from a local shop
to a productized service ([http://draftss.com](http://draftss.com)). We had
tons of advice about how design on subscription model won't work or that we
should have pay per task model or we shouldn't productize our service at all.
After A/B testing we narrowed down to the current model where we are catering
to 10+ clients every month generating $3000+ in MRR.

~~~
fermienrico
Your comment sounds like a plug. You provide no value in your comments as to
why certain advice worked and other didn’t. It seems that the purpose was to
link your business on HN and then find a way to make it relevant to the
discussion.

Audience loses at the expense of your company’s promotion.

------
jacquesm
Very relevant, edw519 evergreen:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343030](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343030)

~~~
fermienrico
I’ve previously commented on what Sam Altman’s startup articles, presentations
and talks sound like.

Sam, if you’re reading this - you do such an excellent job of interviewing
successful startup entrepreneurs. Please do that more as the advice you
provide to others creates more confusion/harm than anything else.

------
Kagerjay
_For a founder, this means picking a single adviser who can inform your
thinking, rather than someone who makes decisions for you._

I've been incredibly fortunate to have met someone locally who has the same
level of tech and business expertise as I do. And appreciates the value and
insight from multitude of industries. I really don't get along with many
people at that deep of a level, so this was extremely rare.

Truthfully I have never had anyone I would call mentor nearly my entire life.
I've always figured everything out myself since that's just how I was raised.

We're both mentors to each other, he has a difficult outlier upbringing like I
have had, different but similar. I've never really realized what my true
weaknesses were until the 5+ hour talks we have discussing everything from how
youtube should learn UX from a pornsite, how to run a political campaign,
psychology theories, neuroscience, chemistry, frontend development, leadership
issues, project management, world education, dealing with nonprofit leaders,
making money playing video games as kids. The talks vary with a really big
open degree of openness, and changes every couple of minutes.

I don't see eye to eye on his visions for the future, but I understand where
he's coming from though. So I appreciate the value he has. I tend to think
extremely short term and grab the "lowest hanging fruit" is what he tells me,
but his visions are all about "planting seeds" which I don't really bother
doing but should be

All his skills complement mine in some weird backwards way and its nice to
know that there's someone out there.

I tend to think tech first before anything and he tends to think business
first so its a nice mix of skills. I tend to be extremely assertive about my
solutions since I've had to do hard sales pitches but his is more gradual and
methodical.

I don't know how well we work coding together though that might be a different
story but we do see eye to eye on many management practice principles, I met
him while doing nonprofit project management.

Anyways, I just wanted to mention this because I find most if not all the
advice I get is really not helpful. Unless you understand the logic behind why
I am doing something before you say something "Seek to understand before
commenting", then its hard for me to appreciate the value of input given. I
appreciate the sentinment and thought process though.

~~~
akharris
How did the two of you originally connect?

~~~
Kagerjay
I went to my local techmeetup to volunteer and do some nonprofit work. There
were 8 nonprofit companies that presented technical challenges they were
facing. They wanted local devs to contribute to their missions as volunteer
work. I met him there, said pleasantries and exchanges / what not. Didn't
really learn much about him then

The week after I had to attend a strategy meetup to actually do a mini
"hackathon" of sorts for projects. Again the 8 companies would do their spiel,
I immediately identified which projects were worth taking and which were not.
Some were just beyond my skillsets others were too much in infancy, etc. I
ended up finding the same guy at the meeting, we were talking silently about
all our opinions about these nonprofits. How competent were they, how far
along were they, etc

He ended up picking the same 2 projects as I did before I knew about it. We
split in groups, I noticed immediately all he did starting off was setting 8
seperate slack channels. He immediately knew communication was vital and
capitalized on it. His company also does a lot of webdev / wordpress dev for
nonprofits so it makes sense for him to do things this way.

I got to learn and see his leadership and management skills in action. In many
ways, they mirrored me own, but were different. While I think tech first and
the solution at hand, his focus was more business oriented. I tend to have a
blunder of just tossing the solution on a plate without getting all the
requirements, and he recognized this instantly and kept things from going off
topic.

We started to hit it off and met up a few times on a 1:1 talking about life.
He would have all these extremely absurd visions about how he wanted to build
a social enterprise and making future impacts, but I couldn't see the
motivation.

Later as I got to know him better he told me of his hardships growing up _(not
going go into detail here)_ , but they closely resembled my own. I have a
debilitating hidden disability growing up that I have not really told anyone
because I never wanted to be treated differently. He has terminal cancer and
probably may or may not have a long lifespan. He hadn't really told anyone but
a handful of people including me.

I have never met someone so intelligent in my life in so many fields. He's
been homeless at one point, worked in politics and legal / litigation, is a
great developer, and is one of the best leaders and managers I have seen. I
have pretty low expectations of people and rarely give compliments like this
if that means anything.

For the longest time in my life I've always wondered if I would meet a person
like me. I didn't think it would happen because (1) I would probably never
know enough about the person to know (2) my background experiences and
hardships are a really far outlier that I think maybe one in a million people
have experienced. The chances of meeting someone like me is almost next to
impossible

------
airstrike
My rule of thumb is: Only take advice from people you're willing to switch
places with.

~~~
notduncansmith
Willing to switch places with them regarding the topic of advice, that is. You
probably aren’t going to get the best technical advice and the best
relationship advice from the same person (unless you have some extraordinarily
wise people around you).

------
adamzerner
Is it possible to get the best of both worlds?

1) Advice from a variety of sources.

2) Not being slowed down by all of the advice.

My impression from the article is that this usually doesn't happen in
practice, but I can't help thinking that it is very doable in theory.

------
andrewstuart
When I was a young entrepreneur I started out believing all the advice I was
given - big mistake.

I learned eventually to listen to advice and consider it and form my own
opinion about whether or not it is correct for me and my circumstances.

------
KineticLensman
I've learned to discount advice that starts with "I'm not an expert, but..."
or "All you have to do is ...".

------
ai_ia
I thought of Naval Ravikant of the word 'Rav'.

------
alexandernst
Ask in HN about more advices about the advices

