Advice is useless and you know it. Study principles like you study math

Whatever you’re pursuing in life right now, I’m sure the internet is full of list of principles to go through that. WLOG, these lists include articles and youtube videos titled like:

_ 20 Pieces of advice I wish I knew at 20
_ 10 Rules for life
_ 7 Life-changing lessons from x

or

_ Priceless advice for entrepreneurs
_ 5 Mental models you can use to think like a strategic genius
_ 10 Mistakes to avoid when building a company.

The problem is that you will read all of these over and over again, and still make all the mistakes.

Advice is cheap. The hard part is not figuring out the algorithms. What’s difficult and valuable is knowing when to apply what.

If you think about it, you already know this. When you are learning about a new branch of mathematics, it’s never enough to read a formula to truly understand it, you need to do lots of exercises and make a lot of mistakes before it becomes part of your intuition.

So why do you expect to learn these mental models and principles by just reading about them? Just like math textbooks, an interesting experiment would be to add to the bottom of these articles exercises: real-world scenarios to be used as exercises to figure out what mental models to apply and how to model the situation, solutions at the end of the book.

In general, all learning happens through production, never by consumption.

Exercises can still fail at capturing real-world complexity.

So you should just get in the arena and think more strategically about your position at any given time.

Some (but the minority) of the authors of these useless advice articles and videos have actually the best intentions and the necessary experience that made them learn about what they’re talking about. What I believe to be effective instead is to chat with these experienced people while you are in the arena, and let them help you see your position through their eyes. Google them, you will find their email. Targeted advice given enough context can change everything.

While more people than you think will reply to your emails, many will probably still not. The good news is that you don’t necessary talk to experts. Usually talking to a friend can help you look at your position more objectively and help you figure out potential strategies and resolutions forward.

So, stop reading bullshit articles and just call your friends.

Replace “friend” with “LLM” and you can still get better results than just passively reading bullshit articles and watching bullshit videos.

As always, you will find me at hello at danielfalbo dot com.