You Know Yourself Best: Advice on Advice

When I first began learning Japanese, I would spend hours watching videos and reading guides on how to do it. I would make all kinds of theories and grand plans for how I would follow the advice in the videos; if I just learn this many words every day like they told me to and watch as many shows as they watched, then I’d get good like they did. However, within a week it became clear that their advice was conflicting with my reality: it wasn’t working. That initial frustration stuck with me, acting as a constant reminder that it’s best to take advice cautiously because of how much individual perspective can influence it.

All good advice is intended to help you—to make your life easier or better in some way. However, advice is built on our own experiences and tailored to our own traits. Since we are all so different, such advice can often be largely inapplicable to others. This is especially true because we often do not give advice tailored to other people. This doesn’t mean that we should entirely reject all advice because it’s not specifically customized for us. Instead, we should look at advice as what it so often is: the crystallized experience of one or many people. Each bit of advice is experience we can and should consider, pulling the bits and pieces that apply to us every time, and leaving the rest for someone else. There’s a Chinese proverb that encapsulates this: “listen to all, pluck a feather from every passing goose, but follow no one absolutely.”

In addition to the difficulty of giving tailored advice, our advice can sometimes miss the mark. There are a variety of reasons (e.g., overconfidence, ego, and oversimplification), but one is the most prominent: the tendency to gloss over external factors that contributed to success. Take the common experience of parents telling their children to attend job interviews with a resume and a firm handshake. This, however, isn’t a common practice now. Parents may have succeeded in landing a job, but the difference between the job markets in different generations makes much of their experience irrelevant for us; the experience of finding a blue-collar job in a market that’s less competitive, pre-internet, and with lower requirements is completely different than trying to score even an entry-level position in today’s oversaturated job market. This exemplifies how people may give advice based on outdated or flawed experience. 

The culture of constantly seeking and giving advice can be harmful if people don’t know how to approach it. The endless torrent of videos, podcasts, and posts providing advice creates a dangerous loop of trying to follow others’ paths instead of finding one’s own. When people are faced with an issue, an immediate response is to look for advice online or even from AI—a habit that is increasing in popularity. The sheer ease of asking a chatbot for advice erodes reasoning and decision-making abilities faster than any misaligned human advice ever could. While it may take longer to learn or tackle problems on one’s own, the process of filtering and ultimately finding one’s own solution is invaluable. It is easy to get lost in a thoughtless cycle of asking for help. While there is nothing wrong with learning from others and asking for help when necessary, advice becomes dangerous when people substitute critical thinking and problem solving with “answers.”

This does not mean that people should stop giving advice or add disclaimers to their tips. While advice has its limitations, learning from others is still a supremely valuable tool that allows us to grow and develop faster. There is no need to reinvent the wheel because people have already figured it out. The issue lies in the tendency to blindly follow advice simply because it works for one person. In reality, another person’s advice is not the solution to our problems. The solution is just as clear: take advice critically—not with hostility, but with a careful eye. Advice should never be a replacement for critical thinking and original ideas. 

With all the fragments of advice that may or may not be valuable, it’s important to use them like tools: try each one, and keep using what works while discarding what doesn’t. After all, you know yourself best. The advice in this article shouldn’t be immune either. If you think this is obvious, or all my writing has missed the mark, then feel free to discard it. In fact, I’d take that as proof that you understood my point perfectly.