My advice? Don't take my advice

Hortative

[hawr-tuh-tiv]

adjective

1. giving advice, urging, or strongly encouraging

Examples of hortative in a sentence:

• The coach's hortative speech motivated the team to give their best effort.
• Her hortative tone encouraged the audience to take action for a better future.

Over the years, I've asked mentors and others for their advice. Most of the time I ignored it. On rare occasions, I was glad I did what they suggested and thanked them for it. More frequently, I took their advice and regretted it.

We all need advice at various times and situations in our lives. We may need advice on career paths, personal development, financial decisions, relationships, health, life transitions, and dealing with crises in life. Good advice is rare, and it is a gift. But you must know how to receive the gift of advice. Taking advice is a life skill. Here is some advice on how to become better at taking advice:

These days, I am asked to give advice to clients and sicktech founders, investors, and others. Here is some advice about giving advice if you are an advisor.

These days when someone informally asks me for my advice, I tell them to not take my advice. Why?

1. The juice is not worth the squeeze
2. When people want to pick my brain and ask, "What do you think?", I tell them that what I think is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what your potential customer will do, not think, and the only way to find that out is to test your ideas. Here is what to do when people want to pick your brain.
3. Most people who agree to give you advice don't have skin in your game, so it really doesn't matter if you take it or not. By its very nature, their advice is biased. There are 151 of them so that's a lot of biases. The most they can do is share their unique, not necessarily generalizable experience, and leave it at that.
4. Most startup entrepreneurs don't have the required customer discovery interview skills, so they waste your time during the interview by asking the wrong questions, like, "what do you think of my invention or app?"
5. Giving people advice rarely works. Research using reactance theory informs us that whenever a person tells us what to do and how to do it, we respond with defensive defiance because we want to maximize our personal freedom and decision-making.
6. In most instances, someone just wants to hear what they want to hear to reinforce their confirmation bias.
7. Actions speak louder than words. I share my story and leave it at that.
8. Socrates noted that, "I can't teach anyone anything. I can only make them think". Now that's good advice.
9. Here are more reasons why you shouldn't take my advice. And more if you still want to take my advice.

10. People without skin in the game only see the benefits of their feedback. In implementing someone’s feedback or advice, there are always ripple effects — unforeseen repercussions affecting your company roadmap that result from the strategic decision or adjustment in question.

Instead of having an answer to every question, the most effective leaders are coaches — people who can guide others to arrive at their own solutions, put them into action, and set goals, says researcher and management consultant Julia Milner.

Find a coach instead

But listening to your inner voice might not be much better than listening to me.

Going with your gut is a tactic a lot of us use to make decisions, but have you ever wondered where that intel comes from? Dr. Jim Loehr and Dr. Sheila Ohlsson Walker, coauthors of Wise Decisions: A Science-Based Approach to Making Better Choices, call the inner voice that guides you “YODA,” which stands for Your Own Decision Advisor. Unfortunately, it can feed you bad information.

When you are looking for advice, you have already made up your mind, at least partly, about what you will do. Often it takes some time for you to pull the trigger, but by then you have already loaded the gun and decided where to aim.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs