Actually Learning From Advice

the most important thing i’ve internalized this year from many mistakes is abstract advice is always someone’s compressed experience.

defining compressed experience as the hundreds of observations, failures, actions, and consequences that end up being compacted into a single sentence.

the immediate problem is that nearly all advice ends up functionally useless because it isn’t presented in an actionable format.

honestly, i think most advice is true but hardly ever actionable.

additionally, it’s very rare to find someone who can articulate the sequence of decisions that produced said advice. most often, you’ll get the conclusion they’ve achieved after years of hands on experience instead of how to quickly get the experience that made said advice obvious.

in this case, the most useful advice i’ve ever heard was “become economically productive and credentials won’t matter.”

great advice, legitimately perfect!

problem: value is in experience, not words.

let’s start by asking, “what does economically productive actually mean?”

economically productive means creating more value than the resources required to create it.

now we have the basic primitive of work defined.

primitive in this situation just means the most basic foundation of any learning topic (in this case, advice).

back on topic: companies invest time, money, and physical labor because there is the inherent goal of getting more economic value back.

wonderful, now we have multiple definitions, and we still don’t know what to do at work tomorrow.

(i’m getting there, i promise.)

the way to get value from advice is by turning someone’s conclusion (the advice given) into questions you can repeatedly ask during real decisions:

“what action creates the most economic value right now?”

advice starts becoming useful when you do this, and most importantly, when advice is applied this way, it begins producing experience much faster than living passively.

let’s say you’re at work, and you have finished all explicitly assigned tasks.

you have zero clue what to do next, and no one is going to tell you. temporarily, you’re an economic vagrant.

the objective is now obvious: create value for the company.

what is not obvious is how to create value because we have limited information. we don’t know what our boss defines as valuable, what the company needs the most, or what problem is costing the most time and money.

now we get closer to the question that makes the advice even more useful: “what information would help me identify the most valuable action?”

now the meta is for you to combine it with another abstract piece of advice:

“you should just listen.”

again, this is largely true, but functionally useless on its own.

what does listening actually look like?

in this case, listening is defined as figuring out what the company measures, rewards, complains about, and repeatedly doesn’t take action on because it’s inconvenient to, or they’ve failed to in the past.

you are listening for evidence of where value is being lost.

time is a scarce and vital resource. you’re not supposed to ask everyone twenty mundane questions about things you can find out easily and gather useless information.

the actual goal is to ask the minimum number of questions that gives you enough information to take a probabilistic best action.

so you ask a constraining question:

“what problem is costing us the most right now, and why?”

a constraining question is just a question whose answer eliminates a bunch of wrong next moves at once.

your boss answers: “the team is losing potential customers because no one is following up fast enough!”

our question has now produced information that did not exist to you prior to asking it, and most importantly, we have changed what we are able to notice.

before asking, all you knew was that you should “be productive.”

after asking, you now are aware of where economic value is currently being lost and can assume how to fix this.

now it’s time to take another compressed piece of advice:

“take initiative.”

fucking great, where do we start?

what does taking initiative actually mean here? let’s define it.

it’s definitely not doing random non-productive work, creating a project that will cost money, or looking “busy.”

taking initiative is better defined as “what valuable action can i take with the information i currently have without waiting to be asked?”

so you create a system that tracks potential customers and ensures someone follows up on a scheduled-time basis.

once you get results from the new system, you look at the feedback:

• -did response time improve?
• -did we immediately address the loss of customers? (customer retention)

most importantly: did our system save more time or money than it cost to create?

if yes: you just created economic value! if no: why did it not create economic value? apply that answer to improve our next decision.

asking these questions did not apply the advice; they produced the experience that the advice was hinting at originally.
our first question determined what we were optimizing for, the second question determined the information we paid attention to, and the third question turned the information into the ability to take autonomous action.

the feedback helped give real-world clarification of whether our understanding of “value” was actually correct.

before any questions were asked, “be economically productive,” “listen,” and “take initiative” were three entirely separate abstractions.

after questions were asked, action was taken, and results were viewed, the value behind all of the abstractions was painfully obvious:

this is also why credentials eventually stop mattering! credentials are indirect evidence that you have some clue or probability of figuring out how to create value.

repeatedly identifying valuable problems and solving them is direct evidence that you already can.

in short, the entire process is this:

abstract advice --> objective --> missing information --> constraining question --> autonomous action --> feedback --> experience

experience gets compressed into judgement, and then you’re capable of asking better questions the next time you are presented with a learning opportunity.

good change what you notice, when your perception of the environment changes your actions become different and locally oriented.

this upgrades the feedback you receive to be more precise and then changes the experience you produce. it’s a very positive feedback loop.

the more precisely abstract is turned into constrained questions, the faster you can reproduce someone’s conclusion and experience what they did.

this can be applied to literally everything, btw.

dating, the gym, cooking, work.

lying under every piece of abstract is a sequence of observations, questions, actions, and feedback.

all you have to do is ask questions.