TL;DR: In today’s information rich world, Learning which advice to ignore is a skill.

This post is not advice, rather observations based on experience.

I classify advice into 2 broad buckets

1. Tactical / specific advice
2. Generic advice

Tactical advice

Tactical / specific advice , is highly specific. This bucket, IMO, consists of advice whose effectiveness can be gauged very accurately and often very quickly.Stuck on a programming problem ? Ask a senior and he can tell you how to solve it and you do. Need to file taxes ? Your tax accountant helps you file taxes and reduces your tax burden. In this case there is a strict material number attached to the gain you make for his services.

Generic advice

Generic / strategic / philosphical advice. These are advice that are “generic”, as in both applicable to large swaths of the population and very broad, applicable to your life or career at any many points in time. Gauging the effectiveness of such advice is hard, sometimes nigh on impossible because the converse of these statements are often not true. For example, take the statement: “hardwork makes you rich”. The converse “being rich means you did hardwork” is not always true (or heck, is not even necessary). Also words like “hardwork” and “rich” are very subjective and for it to be a truly scientific statement, you need to control for all other variables (circumstances, education, luck, the exact year in which you did hardwork).

Generic advice is found everywhere on the internet today. The cost of disbursing information has gone down ~0, so you will find everyone handing out advice on how to live life, what are the right principles to have in life, what you must do and what you must eat.

Tactical advice is relatively easy to evaluate

1. Is the advice from a professional (i.e. someone getting paid for their speciality) and is the advice for something related to that profession ?
2. and is there a direct metric that tells me how much I stand to gain if following that advice ?

Most of the time, the problem is identifying which of the “generic” advice are valuable and which of them are pure BS. I used a few broad principles to gauge how effective some piece of advice can be

1. Most “generic” advice is useless proven otherwise.

Thanks to the sheer Noise to Signal ratio of advice flooded on the internet, it is better to discard all new info first and then go pick for valuable ones later, than to hold onto junk in your head.

2. It is never about the message. It is always about the messenger

Who gives which “generic” advice matters the most. No one will take the daily wage labourer sleeping on the roadside saying that “hardwork matters” seriously. But, when Narayana Murthy or Jeff Bezos or John Carmack says the same thing, everyone perks up their ears. Why ? because the latter are wealthy, and wealth is the signal that will make people listen to you.

3. Follow the money

Follow the money IMO is the most universal advice that I have seen to be consistently true across domains, people and time.

What does the person giving me advice stand to gain from me following the advice ? Take Paul Graham’s essays. He gives a lot of advice on startups, hardwork, what you should do and how you should approach life, and they pretty much end up all end up with the message implicit and explicit: do a startup. It makes sense why PG would say that. He (used to, now retired) runs Y Combinator, probably the most famous tech accelerator in the world, which funds startups in the Seed stage. Given the abysmal statistics around the success rate of startups, the more people that startup, the more options PG has and the more money he stands to make if every talented person pursues a startup in his portfolio that hits it big. PG makes money from people following his advice.

But is the advice useful to you: the follower ? While it is true that YC startups have had billions of dollars of payoff and made billionaires out of founders, the statistics of starting up mean that the likelihood of a great payday that makes money beyond your wildest dreams (or something that beats the earnings over say 10 years of working at a FAANG) is probably close to zero. If you factor in the conditionality of success (say, Stanford dropout, living in Bay Area, being able to have a Harvard/Stanford co-founder), the more average your background is , the smaller the empirical probability of your personal success is.

4. Principal agent problem

Imagine a housing broker that sells houses and gets a 3% commission from both the buyer and the seller on the sale of a house. The broker, while he might have been hired by you to find a house for you, on the guarantee that he will find the best bargains and haggle with the seller to make buying a house affordable for you, has every reason to increase the price of a house as much as possible, for every rupee or dollar the price goes up , his bottomline increases.

Take a fund manager charging a 2% carry per year (carry is the fees as percentage of the total value of the fund being managed). The carry is non-negotiable, so whether a funds performs or not, the fund manager gets to pocket the carry irrespective of how well the fund performs. It is very much in the interest of (especially terrible ones) fund managers to maximise the sizes of the funds being managed, whereas you will have your funds locked up for anywhere between 3-10 years that might have made better returns just being invested in an index fund instead (and probably also redeemable when needed)

What are online advice sellers gaining and more specifically what hidden traps are there that you don’t see, should you choose to follow that advice ? Follower count (yes, in my case, its not something world changing, but the ego boost of seeing your follower count go up is very much real) ? Do they stand to profit off your hardwork, leveraging it, while you pay the opportunity cost of having a family, social life or control over your time ? Do they have liquidity options that you don’t (for example, founders can sell their equity in illiquid startup stock on the secondary market, whereas you, the employee only gets worthless ESOPs)

The thing is, most of the times, you will have to take these bargains knowing that you are still at an disadvantage (eg. ESOPS and low salary at a startup because you can’t find a job anywhere else, or you love the startup and its missions so much that you are willing to take the opportunity cost), but the awareness of the risk plays a role in how one deals with the emotional turmoil of such bets. You can’t control the outcomes, but if you know the risks better, you can for sure control your reactions to the said outcomes. And to me that is the key: am I equipped to deal with the emotional consequences of these outcomes ?