Advice without context

A post I read online encouraged people to take risks and fail. I had done the same in my twenties, on the advice of people I took to be industry experts. It took me a while, and a team of more than 60 people, to understand that the advice was good for them, and good for people with the same privilege and the same goals.

As a reader, I have work to do. In a feed full of advice, a familiar message can start to feel like a reliable one. Before I act on it, I need to consider what the person offering it understands and how much of the missing context I am supplying myself.

A post like that can also leave me feeling guilty twice over: for not starting, and for not quitting.

I know how that goes. For a stretch I followed the formulas of people I admired without question, and I became a copy of someone else. When I take advice now, I try a small version of it first.

Encouragement has a limit

Motivation cannot fill a hungry stomach. It may help someone carry on for a while. What they have to live on decides how long the attempt lasts.

Taking a risk uses something: money, time, attention, energy. Someone still has to meet the commitments that existed before the attempt began. Encouragement can make the next step feel possible while leaving all of those commitments in place.

That is the gap I wanted the advice to account for. Someone with savings and skills they can earn with has options that another person is still trying to build. Both can be willing to work hard. The same instruction to keep trying can ask different things of them.

Even the amount at risk tells only part of the story. One person loses money set aside for an experiment. Another loses the money they needed for ordinary expenses. Calling both experiences failure tells me little about what happens afterwards.

The next attempt needs resources too. A lesson learnt does not settle a debt or restore someone’s confidence. A person can understand exactly what went wrong and still be unable, or unwilling, to go through it again. Advice to fail and try again assumes that another attempt will be available.

Advice has a person at the other end

Before I offer a view on a decision like that, I want to know what the person is trying to change, what they would be putting at risk, and what kind of help they want. Encouragement is one kind. Help with an assumption they have not examined is another. Giving the answer I enjoy giving can leave the actual problem untouched.

The context belongs in the answer

When I share something that worked for me, the conditions that supported it belong in the account. The skills I already had, the resources available and the room to recover help explain why a decision made sense. Leaving those out asks the reader to supply them.

My own account needs the same treatment. When I took those risks I had savings and a skill I could earn with. I had been doing paid web design work since I was a student. I was prepared to lose the savings. The skill would still have been there.

So the risk did not cost me the money. It cost me direction. I grew a team of more than 60 people before I realised I did not want a big team, the hustle or the goal of becoming a millionaire. The advice fitted the experts’ goals as well as their conditions.

A record producer I listened to recently put the same thing another way. There is no one right way. A person’s answer comes out of their own life, and the expert’s answer came out of the expert’s.

The advice I followed in my twenties was right for the people who gave it. When I give mine, the conditions and the goal go with it.