Advice on advice

The problem with advice is that the sender and receiver have different internal representations. The receiver understands the words but not the way the sender does. The sender usually doesn't know this. Most of it is tacit knowledge.

Most advice is autobiographical. Shaped by experience you can't transfer with words. You only realize advice was right after you've already figured it out yourself.

Take an example: someone tells you to work hard. You nod because you already work hard and think you understand.

Then you meet someone who actually works hard. They're answering emails at 6am, shipping code at midnight, reading papers on the weekend. They're doing what you do, but way more of it. The gap is humbling.

Specificity helps. Instead of "work hard," say "I wake up at 5am, work focused blocks until 10pm, and haven't taken a weekend off in three months."

Here's a useful filter: could the opposite also be reasonable advice? "Work hard" fails -- nobody argues for laziness, so there's no information in it. "Move fast" is better because plenty of successful people will tell you to slow down and get it right. If no sane person would argue the other side, you're hearing a truism.

But even good advice has a targeting problem. People self-select into the advice they consume. The cautious person reads "think carefully before acting" and feels validated. The reckless person reads "move fast and break things" and feels the same way. Advice reaches the people who least need it, because they're the ones who sought it out.

Worth asking whether you need what you're hearing, or its opposite. If you're nodding along to "move fast," maybe you're already fast and what you need is to slow down.

Advice lands when the receiver is almost there already. When they've built enough context that the words finally click. The gap has to be small enough for language to bridge it.

This essay is also advice. You'll probably forget it. Until you give someone advice that doesn't land, and then you'll know what I mean.