Most Advice Is a Memoir

What other people's experience can and cannot tell you about your own

The most useful thing I learned about advice I learned too late, and the way I learned it was expensive. So here it is for free.

Advice is autobiographical. Every piece of it. The person giving it to you is telling you what happened to them, what they concluded from it, and what they would do again. They are not, and cannot be, telling you what will happen to you. That gap is not a flaw in the advice. It is the nature of advice. The problem is that it gets delivered in the second person, as if it were meant for you specifically, and received in the second person, as if the recipient’s job is to apply it directly. And almost nobody says out loud: this is a story about me, filtered through my conclusions, offered to you as a suggestion. Try it on. It might not fit.

There is a difference between taking advice and listening to it. Taking advice means importing someone else’s conclusion without their context. Listening to advice means trying to understand what they learned and why they learned it, and then asking separately whether any of it applies to your situation. The first is a shortcut. The second is the actual skill. And the reason most people are better at the first than the second is that it’s much faster, and the person giving the advice usually seems pretty confident, and confidence is contagious in the specific way that other people’s certainty about your situation can temporarily feel like your own.

I have been given a lot of advice in my career. Most of it was well-intentioned. Some of it was genuinely good. A meaningful amount of it was, in retrospect, correct for the person who gave it and actively wrong for me, and I spent years trying to figure out why I couldn’t make it work before I understood that the advice had been generated from a different dataset than the one I was running on.

I am autistic. I have ADHD. I did not know either of those things for most of the time I was receiving the advice. The people giving it to me did not know either. So the advice was calibrated for a neurotypical person navigating a mostly neurotypical professional world, and I was applying it as if it had been calibrated for me, and then privately wondering what was wrong with me when it didn’t produce the expected results. “Be more visible in meetings” is solid advice if the reason you’re not visible is that you haven’t tried. It is not particularly useful advice if the reason you’re not visible is that you’re spending all of your available cognitive bandwidth processing the sensory environment and can’t simultaneously do that and perform spontaneous insight for an audience. Same advice. Completely different applicability.

This is the sharpest version of the problem, but it is not an unusual one. You do not have to be neurodivergent to receive advice that was generated from a different context than yours. The person giving it might have had resources you don’t have, or constraints you don’t have, or a network that made a particular move available to them that isn’t available to you. They might have operated in a different market, a different era, a different size of company, a different set of relationships with power. The advice might have worked for them because of something they are that you are not, and they may have no idea that’s why it worked, because most of us are not great at identifying which variables actually drove our outcomes.

Listening to advice, rather than taking it, means holding the conclusion loosely and asking about the conditions. Not in a dismissive way. Not in the way of someone who has already decided the advice doesn’t apply. More like: what was true for you when this worked? What would have to be true for me? Where does my situation match yours, and where does it diverge, and how much does that divergence matter? This is a richer conversation than the one most advice gives you access to, and it requires treating the advisor as someone whose experience is genuinely interesting rather than someone whose conclusions you are supposed to download.

The social dimension of this is complicated in a way I want to name. Advice often comes with an implicit expectation that it will be followed, and visibly not following it can feel like rejection. In mentor-mentee dynamics especially, in startup culture especially, there is a kind of performance of learning where you receive the advice, express gratitude, and then produce a future version of yourself that validates the advice. The alternative, which is receiving the advice, genuinely considering it, and then deciding it doesn’t apply to your situation, can come across as arrogance or stubbornness or ingratitude, even when it is none of those things. It is just an honest assessment of fit.

What I have tried to start doing, when advice is offered that I’m not sure applies, is saying something that is true: “That’s useful context. I want to think about how it translates to my situation.” This is not a polite brush-off. It is an accurate description of what I’m actually doing with it. I am listening. I am not automatically taking. And I have found that the advisors who are actually worth listening to tend to appreciate this, because they understand that their experience is one data point and not a prescription, and they were offering it as the former and hoping you wouldn’t mistake it for the latter.

The people who are least worth listening to are the ones who need you to follow the advice in order for the advice to matter. That is not advice. That is something else. The right trusted advisor won’t ask you to become smaller.