Why you don’t need more advice

This summer I built a bookshelf for my office. It was too small. So after filling the bookshelf I stored more books in a cupboard. Now, it’s too small. 

I love books. They have taught me about life, leadership, love, and - more recently - living healthy longer. I used to read books for education - searching for insights I could repackage and sell in a course to my clients. Some I read for fun and some dog-eared companions were read by headlamp after being hauled out of a backpack at the end of a long day of travel.

This is the time of year when self-help books fly off the shelves. Overnight bestsellers tackle the eternal life of losing weight, eating better, exercising more, and learning to love ourselves.

It feels good to make a choice to better ourselves.

Books offer us anticipation. As we stand in line, book in hand, to pay or complete the Amazon checkout dopamine is flowing. It feels good to make a choice to better ourselves. After all, everything we need is buried in those 200 pages. Right?

In ancient times, villagers would travel for days to huddle together at the foot of sages hungry for a morsel of insight, or guidance. Today we subscribe to online memberships, sign up for weekly email advice, and stock up on more self-help books. 

We are eternally hungry for advice.

For the record, I wrote a book about productivity and am very grateful to everyone who shelled out $20 for a copy. Feel free to keep buying.

More advice

We take the book home (or open our online reader) and put it on a table or shelf - fully intending to pour over every page. With our new email subscription, we happily devour the first three emails of the 12-week subscription program.

I am learning! You think, as you fold page corners and swipe a highlighter across another line of text. Your mind spins with exciting images of a new you. “I have habits! I sleep 7 hours EVERY night! I eat broccoli!” Life will be different!

And then…

Soon, the dopamine rush wears off, the once-so-valuable emails are lost in your Inbox, and the bookmark hasn’t moved in two weeks.

It’s hard to absorb advice and turn it into action.

Let’s face it, it’s hard to absorb advice and turn it into action. And the older you get the longer the bridge between advice and action - most times it's just all advice. Our bookshelves fill up, old habits return and patterns repeat. 

We are, after all, human.

But wait!

There is a better way. And this is it.

Trust what you already know.

Author’s note: It’s a slippery slope to suggest a better way to get more of what you want is to not take more advice without that itself sounding like advice (you might need to read that sentence twice)! Having said that…

At the risk of denigrating the self-help book industry, you probably already know more than you are using. Capiche? Just think of all the thousands of pages you have consumed on topics you care about. Do you really need another thousand?

If you’ve read more than a few books on leadership, you know the basics: provide direction and support and then get out of the way. Do more of that.

Books on relationships? Listen more than you speak, keep promises, and forgive quickly and completely.

How about health? Eat less, exercise more, and have goals.

I know this sounds basic, but if you haven’t mastered basic advice, why would you need more?

Our endless hunger for more advice is great for publishers.

It’s kind of funny that we read a book, don’t use all the advice and then go get another book to get more advice we won’t use. Our endless hunger for more advice is great for publishers. Not so great for us.

Keep it simple

There’s a reason why instructors for dangerous activities, like avalanche safety, mountain climbing, and skydiving use acronyms as memory devices. They want to keep it simple. Simple is what you need when the shit starts flying and adrenaline is pumping.

There’s also a reason why chapters in many self-help books start with a quote from a poet or author who died 100 years ago. Simple wisdom doesn’t get old. 

Simple also works when you’re creating an amazing life.

Decades of experience can be rendered down to a few most salient lessons.

Listen to famous commencement speeches or wildly-popular TED talks and notice how simple the advice tends to be. Decades of experience can be rendered down to a few most salient lessons. Professional speech writers and TED Talk coaches know adding more ingredients doesn’t make for a better soup.

The most success I’ve had in life came from repeating simple habits over and over. I sit down and write every morning. I head out the door and exercise every day. And I revisit lessons that impacted me. 

I’m still learning, but on my terms.

Learning is a gift

I will always love buying books, being inspired, and, for some, taking notes I can revisit later. Learning is a gift we can give ourselves at any age. 

But today, instead of searching for more advice, I’m revisiting - maybe sometimes refining - simple lessons I’ve learned before.

Complicated prescriptions, models, and strategies sell books. Simple makes for a great life.