Getting advice

How do you get advice from someone else?

And when you get it, how do you know if it’s any good?

You can ask anyone for advice.

But you need two things for advice to be valuable:

- Provide relevant context to the person 👤

- Consider their advice in the context of your goal 🎯

Provide relevant context to the person 👤

Even something simple like: “Where is the best place to get pizza?” can be radically different, from the same person, with different context.

There can be a huge difference between:

“Where is the best place to get pizza around here?”

and

“Where is the best place to get pizza in your hometown?”

Both can be valid, but if they don’t know the context you’re hoping to gain from them then they can’t know how to give relevant advice to you.

In other words, without getting clear on context you don’t know how relevant it is to your goal...

Consider their advice in the context of your goal 🎯

So now you have some advice. You should consider:

Where did it come from?

And what are you trying to do with it?

That’s the relevance to you and your goals.

Do you take advice from everyone?

Of course not.

“Take this with a grain of salt" should apply to everything unless the advice is relevant to you!

Imagine that you’re planning to make a big purchase.

You ask a random passerby on the street which brand they would buy.

And you ask a friend with similar taste to yours who has bought multiple of the brands in question.

Which do you think would give more relevant advice?

The passerby could be an expert, in which case you scored some high-relevance advice 🙃

So next time you’re looking for advice, remember to:

- Provide relevant context to the person 👤

- Consider their advice in the context of your goal 🎯

That way the advice is as applicable to your goals as possible 👌