Advice on Advice - Taking Everything with a Grain of Salt
May 22, 2025
Navigating the twists and turns of career advice can be challenging. The discussion emphasizes the need to critically evaluate feedback and contextualize advice, even from trusted sources. Interesting insights reveal that positive feedback doesn't guarantee success, as unexpected events can disrupt plans. Resilience is key—preparing for luck and potential failures is essential. Ultimately, the conversation encourages listeners to view advice as a fluid exchange of experiences rather than concrete rules, fostering a community dialogue.
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question_answer ANECDOTE
Avoiding Layoff by Leaving Early
Jonathan Cutrell narrowly avoided a layoff by leaving his job a week before it happened.
He later found out he was indeed on the layoff list and reflected on the complex feelings this caused.
insights INSIGHT
Advice Can Be Contradictory
Career advice shapes your thinking but can be contradictory or unreliable.
Even trusted sources may give advice that doesn't apply or is misleading.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Filter and Test Advice Carefully
Keep listening to feedback and look for common themes, not isolated advice.
Test and contextualize advice but realize outcomes may still be out of control.
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This episode explores the complex landscape of receiving advice in your career, particularly during uncertain times. It offers insights on how to critically evaluate feedback and external information, prepare for potential negative outcomes outside of your control, and adapt your focus to thrive in a changing industry.
Explore why the vast amount of advice you receive throughout your career, including feedback from bosses and peers, platitudes, anecdotes, data, opinions, and facts, will shape your thinking.
Discover that even people you trust and consider authoritative may give advice you shouldn't listen to. Sometimes, all the positive signals and feedback you receive may not predict negative career events like layoffs or not getting a promotion.
Learn not to stop listening to feedback, but instead listen for themes and common threads that resonate with your gut intuition.
Understand the importance of contextualising people's assertions, testing them, and putting them through the wringer. However, even when following great advice and testing it, you might still experience negative events like a layoff, as luck and chaos agents are often at the helm and are not under your control.
Discover why it is important to not only prepare for luck but also to prepare for failure modes – situations that go poorly regardless of your upfront actions.
Learn that resilience, preparation, and the ability to absorb impacts (becoming antifragile) are likely to happen because you recognise what happens in the margins and prepare for eventualities you may not think are likely, rather than solely from receiving good advice.
Consider that there are no real silver bullets or secret answers in career advice; moments of wisdom shared by others are often just a snapshot of one experience.
Learn to make decisions within your limited context and apply advice dynamically, considering how it changes with environmental shifts and plays out in unlucky scenarios.
Discover the advice to be a little bit more skeptical of the advice you believe the most and a little more accepting of advice that might seem counterintuitive or on the fringes.
Explore the crucial shift in focus from developing skills to emphasising ownership and responsibility to combat fear about the industry changing and your skills potentially losing value due to factors like AI or layoffs.
Understand that taking responsibility means being willing to be the accountable person and figuring out how to achieve goals, which doesn't necessarily require having the skill yourself but rather being willing to supervise, verify, or import skills.
Recognise that ownership and responsibility are difficult to export or outsource, and a human in the loop is critical for taking ownership and finishing the job, unlike trying to hold an AI accountable.
Learn the practical advice to drive conversations with your manager towards growing your scope of responsibility, accountability, and ownership, which builds trust and reliability beyond just your skill set.
Understand that your perception of the criticality of your tasks and meetings is usually inflated, and the ramifications of not attending are often much smaller than you imagine.
Discover a tactical method to evaluate your obligations (meetings, tasks) based on their pliability (ease of being moved or changed) and volatility (risk/negative effect of changing it) to help you manage your time.
Learn to be ruthless in identifying how you spend your time.
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