The LE Advice Paradox
Anthony Argenziano
Helping product teams build products their customers will love! | Founder & CEO @ VelocitiPM
I've been thinking a lot about advice lately, so it seemed like a great topic to write about. I even came up with a catchy title for my article, "The Advice Paradox." Well, a quick google search reminded me nothing is new and everything has been done already. Yeah, I found a LOT of existing articles and documents already using my clever title. That's where the LE comes into play. This is the Least Experience Advice Paradox. I'll come back to that in a bit.
All it takes these days is a few minutes scrolling through your LinkedIn feed to find advice about pretty much anything and everything. Oh, and are you a founder pitching your startup idea? Prepare for way more advice than you were wanting or expecting. Have a job interview coming up? Be prepared for a soliloquy or two or ten about how best to respond to questions and position yourself. There's no shortage of advice on any topic these days.
While it may sound like I'm saying advice is a bad thing, rest assured I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that advice comes at us in many ways. Who do we listen to? Do we take all the advice we get? How do we know which advice to follow and which to discard? Should I give advice? Who should give advice?
Let's start with all the various options related to advice.
Receiving Advice
Providing Advice
Given all the possible options for giving and receiving advice, it's no wonder many people suffer from advice overload. But the focus of this article is not advice on how to give and receive advice. See what I did there?
My focus here is the Least Experience Paradox. What I see often, and can speak from personal experience on, is the phenomenon where the more experience you have (in business, a specific domain, life, etc) the less likely you are to provide advice. Having been on both sides of the advice exchange and knowing the domain well, we often talk ourselves out of providing advice. We think of the times we received bad advice and acted on it, or received good advice and didn't take action. We end up believing it best to just let the person seeking or needing advice to learn for themselves.
In contrast, when you have less experience in the situation or domain, there are no, or at least fewer voices in your head convincing you to hold back and let them learn it on their own.
You may also be familiar with the Solomon Paradox, a phenomenon where we are better at advising others than ourselves. It's named after King Solomon, who was known for his wisdom and ability to provide guidance to others, but made poor decisions in his own life.
The Solomon Paradox arises from our tendency to view problems more objectively when they are faced by someone else. When asked to provide advice to others, we're able to take a step back from the emotional and psychological factors that can cloud our judgment. We see the situation clearly and provide more rational advice. However, when we face the same problems in our own lives, we're unable to maintain an objective viewpoint. Our emotions and biases come into play, and we often make poor decisions as a result.
I believe these same factors come into play with experience vs lack of experience. As experience grows, we also accumulate biases, minimize objectivity, and generally lose the ability to make good decisions and provide good advice to both ourselves and others.
So am I saying experienced people don't provide advice? Definitely not! As I said in the beginning, experience is everywhere, from every level of experience. I'm also not saying less experienced people providing advice is a bad thing. I'm mainly identifying and naming a paradox that I've been seeing, and looking for more insights and feedback on this phenomenon.
What do you think? Have you seen this phenomenon in your personal or business life? What is your decision making process when it comes to giving or receiving advice?