Michael Ellsberg explains how to spot bad advice by checking if your advisor has the results you want. He separates safety-focused advice (common from parents) from excellence-focused advice, and says to weight them based on what matters to you.
Hey everyone. My name is Michael Ellsberg and I write a column on entrepreneurship and education and career development on Forbes.com and I'm the author of the Education of Millionaires.
What do you do when you're getting bad advice? How do you recognize it? How do you deal with it?
There's a saying, the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree. So the fruit is the advice. So just look at the tree. So if someone is saying, oh, you shouldn't do those self development programs, that's all a bunch of bull, you know, you should hide yourself on the Internet. You should stick with the crowd. That is advice. So look at the tree. Who's the tree giving the advice? And it's probably someone who, my guess is, is in a middle management job who in a kind of bureaucratic situation where there's a premium on fitting in and on not sticking out. If that's what you want to do, you should follow that advice. My advice tends to be pretty edgy, pretty individualistic, pretty in your face. It's really bad advice if you want to fit into a corporate bureaucracy. I've never. I'm totally unemployable. Like I'm just. That's why I'm self employed is because I can't be employed. I speak my mind. I like to keep my own hours. I like to sleep in all these things that don't fit in with working in a bureaucracy. So if you want to work in a bureaucracy, you shouldn't listen to my advice. If you want to be self employed, you should listen to my advice over someone who's not self employed. So it's really just looking at what results you want and listening to the people who have those results.
What about if it's someone that has to be around you? Like you're getting advice from your mom, right? And you can't just be like, oh, I'm not gonna listen to this advice or I don't want to hear it. You just have to hear it over and over. It's your dad or it's your uncle who you live with, whatever it may be. How do you handle that?
You want to keep an eye out for whether someone is concerned about your safety or your excellence. And those are usually opposed. So parents generally are more concerned about safety, which makes sense. They're there to keep you safe. They were there to keep you safe as a child and they tend not to outgrow that. So the kind of things you think about when you're concerned about someone's safety are safety in numbers, stick in, don't stick out too much, don't take too many risks. Fit in, go through all the loop, jump through all the hoops. And that's great advice if you're prioritizing being safe and secure. It's not great advice if you want to be excellent because by definition, excellence is sticking out from the herd. It's excelling ahead of everyone else.
That's probably one of the best frames I've ever heard on that. I love that.
