Why good advice comes with risks
Useful advice needs to have the possibility of being wrong
One goal of this project is to avoid the traps of most self-help books. I’ve already criticized how platitudes, popular advice we repeat in culture, are often useless because they’ve too vague to help us. One good example, from writer Scott Young, is the problematic advice to be yourself.
This is a phrase that sounds lovely. Most of us like to hear it. It suggests that at our core we are good and worthy and that society and time wear us down, making us less like who we truly are. This sounds nice, doesn’t it? The problem is it does not make much sense. We are always ourselves! We can’t not be ourselves.
It is certainly true that we can choose to explore who we were. Or examine how we have changed. We can also decide to grow, or even restore, something about ourselves. But regardless of whether we do this or not, in any given moment we are ourself. There is no one else here.
It’s a quirk of language that we can say things that sound important but really do not make any sense. In the philosophical comedy film I Heart Hukabees the question how am I not myself plays a central role. It pokes fun at the weirdness of language and overthinking. How can you ever not be yourself? Platitudes often have a circular logic or use words in ways that do not hold up well to basic questions. It’s a sign that the advice is not as helpful as it seems.
Here’s a general rule of good advice from Scott Young:
Advice needs to have the possibility of being wrong. It needs to suggest one thing at the expense of something else. And, when the evidence is mixed, it should polarize some people to agree and others to object strongly. If advice can’t be wrong, it doesn’t mean anything at all.
This means that for advice to be good it is the context that matters. The same suggestion can be a terrible mistake or a brilliant insight. To say fortune favors the bold, a classic platitude, denies that many bold people failed or died as a direct result of their boldness. What makes advice good or bad then is who the advice is given to and what situation in life they are currently in.
Of course a platitude, or a book, is just a bunch of words. It can’t know the life of the reader. The challenge then is how to write a book of advice that helps the reader put the advice into context and helps them decide how and when to apply it. And when it should be ignored.
I'd say being yourself is the easy part - knowing yourself is the challenge. and my only advice there is taking more orbits around the sun...
Back when the armed forces were weirdly against each other (such as tanks versus horses) it was Sir Basil Liddel-Hart who pointed out, after WWI, that a diverse tool box was a good thing, rather than an army of all tanks or all planes or all horses.
It was George Orwell, in the days of poetry, before transistor radios, who said that when you wanted to express something, the pop culture poetry of Kipling would spring to mind. Similarly, f I were on the brink of doing something scary, then the platitude of boldness would come into my mind. As a tool.