When I started writing this blog more than thirteen years ago, I never intended for it to be an advice column. The tagline has always been “Ideas, Business, Stories.” Sometimes it’s not about business, sometimes I fail to shape a decent story, but I always try to center the content around ideas, which comes first for a reason. Nothing in these words other than keeping me in practice between books is more important to me than causing people to think harder and test those thoughts in ardent dialogue and discussion.

I’ll admit, too often I’ve delved into the realm of advice. I won’t apologize for that per se, because I’ve heard from many of you over the years struggling with similar challenges that extracted bits of this advice have led to course corrections, strategic realignment, saving a customer, or even circumventing the unneeded pain of a failed initiative without key learning. If the reading material was helpful, great. If not, perhaps at least I got you to reconsider the ordinary.

What is better than advice and where I’ve hoped to steer a lot of these words? That would come back to ideas, and that would be anchored in inspiration.

With advice, we often suggest what to do and when to do it.

With inspiration, we better suggest why something is worth rethinking and how perhaps to approach a framework for effective resolution.

Never was this clearer to me than in a candid panel discussion at my latest college reunion ostensibly about third acts in our lives. Understand this is a collection of oldsters whom I would be so bold as to characterize as not yet ancient. This group now has four decades of life and career under its belt post-college, with all the setbacks and curveballs we are certain everyone else is likely to encounter. In simply introducing this panel, the moderator found several of the participants rejecting the very premise of the panel in asking: Why does any life have to be structured in three acts? While that framework might (or might not) work at times for commercial storytelling, what relevance does it have to most human arcs, which are infinitely more nuanced?

Yes, it was that kind of discussion. The ideas that emerged were worth the nitpicking.

Key among those ideas for me, and quite a surprise at that, was the somewhat common theme that all the diverse participants shared in acknowledging most of the advice they received throughout their lives as well-meaning but demoralizing.

Wait, huh? If you know people genuinely care about you, or at least give them the benefit of that doubt, why would the advice offered too often hurt more than help?

Again, the commonality in response was striking: Advice considers the general case rather than the personalization of the specific case. Indeed, if the recommended advice worked for you in your set of decisions and you were happy with the outcome, that’s terrific. It’s more than terrific if you navigated a complex maze to get safely and successfully to where you wanted to be. What relevance is it likely to have for me? Much less than you think.

In these cases, the advice individuals received from people close to them centered on career, family, self-realization, medical and health problems, losing loved ones, even planning for retirement. The standard expressions of get an education, get a starter job, climb the ladder, pursue a family, invest wisely, and confront demons as they emerge all seemed too pat in hindsight. Get an education to you might not be the same as get an education to me. Find fulfilling employment, even gainful employment, again proved a landmine of difficult-to-connect dots.

The biggest problem seemed to be that rejecting advice could insult the advice-offerer, but more troubling, cause the advice-offerer to segue from advice to criticism. To the extent this set of unique, highly motivated fellow travelers at difficult junctures in their lives wished to hear criticism… well, you can imagine how that kind of rejection lands. Feedback opens the door to curiosity, which fuels the exploration of a theme and extends two-way dialogue. Even the tiniest implication of judgment can shut it down.

Instead of advice, the panel craved peer interaction, within and across disciplines, within and across life stages, to light a torch that could lead them through opaque corridors and dark tunnels. To some extent, this means active listening combined carefully with real-time conversation, avoiding the trap of prescriptive solution crafting. It is precisely the inspiration of those exchanges that people found most useful in designing and committing to better outcomes. It’s the difference between canned narrative touting relatively obvious answers and imaginative moments of shared realization. Advice was predisposed to be narrow. Inspiration was ceaselessly unlimited.

Still think we’re nitpicking? I don’t think so. I’ve written many times that in my own worldview, the course of our lives often comes down to four to six invisible forks in the road. As Yogi Berra liked to say, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The problem with these invisible forks is just that — you don’t know you’re there when you are. We understand our relationships and careers in hindsight way better than we plan them forward. We can point to those stunningly revealed forks looking back. We can’t necessarily know that a decision we make today will affect our lives for decades to come.

If you are potentially at one of those invisible forks, and you start to explain it to someone, the advice they offer you (“Why, yes, you have to take that job”) is as likely to be wrong as right. Throwing darts would probably get you better results because at least the dartboard is unbiased. On the other hand, if the dialogue we enjoy at those potential forks causes us to think differently and make a decision we are comfortable living with right or wrong, the interaction is likely to be memorable and long-term laudable. It’s the difference between practical direction, which is somewhat hierarchical, and empathy, which is bonding.

All of this is to say if any of my advice in these passages has been useful, I am happy I didn’t blow it. If it has been thin and irrelevant, or worse, demotivating, I do apologize. On the other hand, if any of the ideas here have lifted your spirits to encourage better decision-making, I am humbled. My goal is not to articulate what I think you ought to do. My goal is for you to feel great about your choices and decisions. If I have stretched your notion of possibility along the way, then the words did the job I intended.

To my aging classmates, thank you again for the inspiration. You got me to rethink my own sense of purpose in a manner only you could achieve. I’ll try to repay the favor going forward with the precious time ahead we can still share.

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Image: Pixabay