Good Advice or Bad Advice? A simple test

There are paradoxes surrounding advice. One of the most widely accepted pieces of advice is to “not take advice”. A related confusion arises when someone, typically an authority figure, tells us what they think we should do and then says “follow your heart”. Next, there is all the conflicting advice you will find. Also, advice is demanding: it takes time to follow every good habit and read every recommended book, and we simply cannot do it all.

Typically these last two have been a major theme in my recent life. My strained relationship with advice made me adopt a really strong position against advice. For a while I decided I would neither take nor give advice.

This was a hard rule. At times there was something I just had to tell someone, or someone just had to tell me. I found, that many of the exceptions I made to my rule were actually of value. There was still good advice out there – and I wanted to let it back into my life.

The characterisation of good and bad advice that I present here comes from my very real struggle to try and identify when advice was worth sharing or receiving. It is a conceptual analysis that I am especially proud of.

Good Advice is typically shared as new information. The giver is saying something like “Hey, did you know that ___”. The receiver of the advice is free to consider the information in their actual decisions and give it as much importance as they find appropriate.

Bad Advice is when someone gives you no new information, and instead asks you to value something more than you already do.

Let’s look at examples:

1. Bad Advice: “You’ve got to go to the gym regularly, it’s so good for your health”

Everyone knows that exercise is good for your health. No new information is given, just a demand to value going to the gym more.

2. Good Advice: “Did you know that you can hide the recommendations on YouTube and that doing that might make you stop spending hours watching YouTube videos?”

Information is offered. Take it or leave it.

3. Bad Advice: “Study really hard. It will help you in life”

Vague. How hard? How will it help? Also who doesn’t know that already?

There’s no new information again, the person just wants you to care more about studying.

4. Good Advice: “Do you know that you can significantly improve your posture by positioning your monitor at the right height? People aren’t sitting right at a computer because laptop screens are a lot lower than is good for your back — and this hurts posture.”

Again, this is simply some information, It’s not telling you that posture is really important — you already know that. Instead it’s telling you a solution that you might not have known about.

Hope that was a helpful analysis!