The Advice You Don't Need

I’ve never met a successful person who didn’t get advice along the way. Everyone needs advice to make it.

Advice is one of those things you can’t avoid, like food or water. We’re built to rely on it. Humans thrive on cumulative culture, passing down what works, what doesn’t, through every generation. It’s what makes us different from animals. Joseph Henrich writes about it in his book “The Secret of Our Success.” Humans don’t just imitate; we transmit. We trade stories, skills, blueprints for life, and without that, we wouldn’t have cities, technologies, or any of the philosophies we claim to live by.

The problem is, it’s never easy finding the right advice. And even when you do, you’re stuck wondering if it’s worth following. But that’s an old problem. Over time, we’ve built filters for advice, for example:

1) The Self-Delusion Filter. People don’t just lie to you—they lie to themselves. It’s not malicious; they’ve bought into their own bullshit. They craft a narrative that makes sense to them, and then they pass it on like it’s gospel. But it’s fiction, just another story they’ve spun for themselves. We all do it. You just have to be careful listening to it.

2) Unsolicited Advice. Be wary of advice you didn’t ask for. It’s almost always tainted by the giver’s personal baggage—their experiences, their preferences, their worldview. It’s about them, not you. They hand it over without knowing your situation, without understanding what you actually need.

3) Don’t Ask a Barber if You Need a Haircut. When someone stands to benefit from a particular outcome, they might prioritize their own interest over your actual needs. They’ve got something to gain, so they’ll steer you toward whatever serves them best. The barber? Of course he’ll say you need a trim—his paycheck depends on it. It’s not about whether you really need it, it’s about keeping his chair full. Their interest clouds the advice, and suddenly, it’s less about your needs and more about their bottom line.

The New Problem with Advice

Advice used to be difficult to attain. Today we’re drowning in it. In a world overflowing with advice, the challenge isn’t finding guidance—it’s filtering it. The more advice we’re exposed to, the harder it becomes to distinguish what’s truly valuable. The internet has unleashed the Advice-Self-Improvement Complex.

At the same time our world has also given individuals more options available to them. More options and more advice. We need better mental tools to deal with it.

The World Used to Have Less Options

Getting advice used to be simpler because life itself was simpler. Back then, paths were clear, laid out across generations. People followed their parents, mimicking their careers, their lifestyles, even sticking to the same towns. Advice passed down cleanly, because the choices didn’t shift much—farming, running a family business, working in a specific trade. It was all predictable. Elders handed you their wisdom, and it made sense because their world looked just like yours.

The old sources of advice sometimes don’t work. We can’t just rely on old people. Their life is nothing like yours. Take employment, for example. My great uncle’s two rules: pick an employer and stay for life, and always pay cash—houses included. But that’s not how it works anymore. I’ve got 5 former employers that don’t even exist now, and no, I don’t have a spare million in a briefcase to pay cash for a house. Times have changed, and so the advice has to change as well.

Today We Have Limitless Options

The sheer number of options available to us makes things complicated. You’re not expected to follow your parents' path anymore. You can take a different career, lifestyle, or philosophy. Want to start a business? Move across the world? Invest in stocks, change careers, real estate, or crypto? The choices are endless, and traditional “one-size-fits-all” advice just doesn’t work anymore. The possibilities we have now would be unimaginable to people from the past. It can be overwhelming.

The Advice Consoomer

You can spend all your day consuming people giving advice on every platform. It’s become it’s own genre of entertainment. An offshoot of the self-improvement movement. Not all of its bad. Some of it is decent advice. But how do you know?

@discinity

Easy trick to fix your mindset NOW☝🏼#motivation #advice #trick #lifehack #lifelessons #lifechanging #lifequotes #success #mindset #mentalh... See more

Finance

Mood

Public Speaking

But with so much info coming at you from all sides, it’s crucial to filter what’s actually useful. If you get it right, the internet’s advice culture can be a game-changer, giving you early access to trends, opportunities, and lifestyle tips long before the rest of the world catches up.

In This Newsletter

1) Five New Heuristics for Living in a World Overflowing with Advice:

• Consider the Counter-Advice

• Experts Only Matter Sometimes

• Are You Being Trolled?

• Fishing for Validation

• Am I Right Audience for this Advice?

2) The Chat Bot Advice Revolution: AI agents will transform how we get advice by offering personalized, real-time guidance tailored to individual needs, making the process faster and more precise. However, relying too heavily on AI risks losing human intuition and critical thinking, as well as potential biases in the algorithms that could skew advice in harmful ways.

New Heuristics for Advice

1) Consider the Counter-Advice

One thing about advice turning into a marketplace online: you get to watch advice givers battle it out in real-time, each trying to one-up the other. It's entertaining and useful. You're no longer stuck in the old way of blindly following advice. Now, you can sit back and watch the flaws get exposed, layer by layer. There’s more to the story now.

In the past, advice didn’t have to deal with market pressures like this. It was just handed to you, and you either followed it or didn’t. Today, context gets added. It’s almost like you're getting live commentary on what’s good advice and what’s a trap.

Take this tweet, for example. The original tweet is straightforward: find a partner you can talk to. Solid advice, right? But the counter-advice makes an even better point—if your marriage is going to involve kids, there are way more important traits to focus on. You don’t need your partner to be your conversation fix. You can get that elsewhere. For a marriage with kids, you're better off looking for qualities that matter more in that scenario. You start seeing things differently when advice has to compete.

2) Experts Only Matter Sometimes

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.