yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Reject Most Advice


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

Regarding the guy that gets rich in five years, one of the tweets that you had on the cutting room floor was: avoid people who got rich quickly; they're just giving you their winning lottery ticket numbers. This is generally true of advice anyway, which is it's back to Scott Adams' systems, not goals.

If you ask a specific person what works for them, very often it’s just like they're reading out the exact set of things that work for them which may not be applicable for you. They're just reading your winning lottery ticket numbers. It's a little glib; there is something to be learned from them, but you can't just take their exact circumstance and map it onto yours.

The best founders I know, they listen and read to everyone, but then they ignore everybody and they make up their own mind. They have their own internal model of how to apply things to their situation, and they do not hesitate to discard information. If you survey enough people, all the advice will cancel to zero. So you do have to have your own point of view, and when something is said your way, you have to very quickly decide: is that true? Is that true outside of the context of what that person applied it in? Is it true in my context, and then do I want to apply it?

You have to reject most advice, but you have to listen to and read enough of it to know what to reject and what to accept. Even in this podcast, you should examine everything. If something does not feel true to you, put it down, set it aside. If too many things seem untrue, delete this podcast.

I think the most dangerous part of taking advice is that the person that gave it to you is not going to be around to tell you when it doesn't apply any longer. Yet I view the purpose of advice as a little different than most people. I just view it as helping me have anecdotes and maxims that I can then later recall when I have my own direct experience, and say: ah, that's what that person meant.

Ninety percent of my tweets are actually just maxims that I carve for myself. They are then little mental hooks to remind me when I'm in that situation again. Like, oh, I'm the one who tweeted: if you can't see yourself working with someone for life, then don't work with them for a day. So as soon as I know that this person is not going to be someone that I'm gonna be working with 10 years from now, I have to start extricating myself from that relationship or just not investing that much more effort into it.

So I use my tweets and other people's tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and be able to recall them. Because, you know, the brain space is finite; your finite neurons. So you can almost think of these as pointers, addresses, mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up. If you don't have the underlying experience, then it just reads as a good collection of quotes. It's like it's cool; it’s inspirational for a moment. Maybe you make a nice poster out of it, but then you forget it and move on.

So all of these are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.

More Articles

View All
Hands off My Phone! (An ELA audio drama)
[Music] [Applause] Oh no, he didn’t! That is so harsh. Hey, your dad took your phone away just for getting a D on the history test? Yup, my mind is blown. Mine too! I mean, that was an easy test. What? I can’t believe you got a D! Hey, that’s not really……
Proof: The derivative of __ is __ | Advanced derivatives | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
The number e has all sorts of amazing properties. Just as a review, you can define it in terms of a limit: the limit as n approaches infinity of 1 + 1/n to the nth power. You could also define it as the limit as n approaches zero of 1 + n to the 1/nth pow…
This Is The World's First Geared CVT and It Will Blow Your Mind - Ratio Zero Transmission
Today I have the privilege to hold in my hands something very special. This is the world’s first operational, gear-based, continuously variable transmission or CVT. And before I explain how this piece of absolute mechanical poetry actually works, allow me…
How Do You Convince Someone to Join Your Startup? - Dalton Caldwell
This is a super common question where someone wants to start a startup and they’re like, “Well, how do I get a co-founder, or how do I get my first employees?” My advice is the following: first, you have to convince yourself. If you’re not fully committed…
Ilya Volodarsky - Analytics for Startups
Hi everyone! My name is Ilya. I’m one of the co-founders at Segment, and I’m here to talk to you about how to set up analytics and the analytics foundation to build your MVP and to measure these primary and secondary metrics. So this is going to be a lit…
Justification with the mean value theorem: table | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
The table gives selected values of the differentiable function f. All right, can we use a mean value theorem to say that there is a value c such that f prime of c is equal to 5 and c is between 4 and 6? If so, write a justification. Well, to use the mean…