Life advice and practical advice
Life advice concerns things like whether to get married, whether to move to Chicago, whether to go to law school, if it makes sense to have another kid, whether to break ties with a family member, et cetera. Practical advice concerns things like how to do a proper deadlift, how to get a job, how to learn Italian, where to find the best kebab in a neighborhood, how to get a baby to stop crying, et cetera. I struggle to nail down the distinction. The best I can do is the above list of examples and the general observation that life advice tends to be ungoogleable and about “should I?”, while practical advice tends to be googleable and about “how?”.
For life advice, questions are better than stories, and stories are better than instructions:
For practical advice, questions are annoying and instructions are helpful. For life advice, questions are essential and instructions are a last resort. People can usually solve their own life problems when nudged with the right questions. Even when they can’t and advice-givers need to give direct suggestions, instructions are better when preceded with lots of questions.
With this distinction between practical and life advice in mind, we can move onto the first reason why most advice is bad.
Reason #1: Instructions are easier to give and receive than questions
I once met a sensitive financial planner whose office is full of Kleenex boxes. She asks her clients probing questions about family and lifestyle. It’s only after coming to a deep understanding of their values and motivations that she starts talking about IRAs and mutual funds. This is a lot of work. It would be easier for her to go to an online retirement calculator, punch in some numbers, and spit out a plan. It’s a lot of work for her clients too: the thoughtful financial planner said she often turns down people who won’t make themselves vulnerable enough to receive good advice. Instructions are easy to give and receive, but meaningful questions are difficult to ask and difficult to answer.[1]
In the internet age, when we ask people for advice it’s usually ungoogleable life advice. But asking the questions necessary for good life advice is hard, so advice-givers often skip the work of figuring out the advice-seeker’s circumstances and simply start giving instructions. They might start speaking to a younger version of themselves or “kids these days” instead of to the advice-seeker sitting in front of them. Advice-seekers bear some responsibility for bad advice too—I’m guarded, so I get awful life advice. Those of us with avoidant attachment styles can only get good life advice from old friends or people with exceptional interpersonal skills.
Life advice is harder to come by and more valuable than practical advice. But we tend to receive bad life advice because questions are messier than instructions.
Reason #2: It’s hard to say things that are both specific and relevant
My high school physics teacher showed my class two important elements of a good measurement: precision and accuracy. He explained the difference with a graphic that looked something like this:
Likewise, there are two elements to good advice: specificity and relevance. This is true whether the advice comes in the form of instructions, stories, or questions. I’m going to walk through the three ways the darts can miss the bullseye, and advice can fail to be both specific and relevant. Then we’ll finally get to that one weird trick. Let’s say you’re wondering how to get a good grade in constitutional law.
Vague and irrelevant advice
You ask someone how to do well on the exam, and they answer, “I always say: honesty is the best policy.” This is my favorite kind of bad advice since it often comes from a place of love (e.g., your parent who didn’t go to law school). But it does just as often come from indifference (e.g., someone who got dragged onto a panel discussion). In any case, it’s not helpful.
Vague but relevant advice
Now let’s say your advice-giver tells you, “Go to class, do the readings, and find good outlines.” This advice is better. But it’s still not specific—it doesn’t tell you what to do during class, how to approach the readings, what to do with an outline, or how to allocate your time.
Vague advice can be helpful, but its helpfulness depends entirely on who is being addressed. Consider the prominent internet shower thought, “How is it that ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ but ‘actions speak louder than words?’” The answer is the audience—a thoughtless goon needs the first vague aphorism while a hesitant waffler needs the second. Usually though, people deliver vague advice without really knowing the person receiving it. So it’s like a tape measure with only foot markers: accurate, but not super helpful. We need specificity.
Specific but irrelevant advice
Now let’s say your advice-giver insists you must pay attention to Justice Kennedy’s concurrence in Parents Involved if you want an A. They tell you the way Kennedy avoids the typical modalities of constitutional argument provides deep insights into the frameworks that underpin the course. This is the most common and the most frustrating sort of bad advice: hyper-specific to the advice-giver’s prior successes but irrelevant to the advice-seeker. An approach that helps one student write an effective policy essay might be useless to another. Columnist Mary Schmich warns, “Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”
Specific and relevant advice
Now imagine your advice-giver has a long conversation with you. They learn about your performance on a midterm exam: You showed a strong command of how the Constitution limits and empowers the federal government but struggled with a policy question about the consequences of Brown (you’re an international student without much context for American history). Your advice-giver points you to the exact slides you need to review in order to build a perspective on the development of constitutional law, and provides feedback on some practice essays you sketch out in the weeks leading up to the exam.
Good advice is rare and you should cherish it. And it’s much easier to provide specific and relevant practical advice than life advice. Which leads us to that trick.
The one weird trick for avoiding bad advice
The one weird trick for avoiding bad advice is to never ask for life advice. Never ask for anything resembling life advice. Never give anyone the slightest suggestion you’re in the market for life advice or it will come, unsolicited and unhelpful.
As far as I can tell, the only two ways to give good (i.e., specific and relevant) life advice are to already know someone well or to ask them many questions over a long period of time. Advice-givers rarely have the time for this. So just don’t ask for life advice, and you’ll avoid a lot of bad guidance.
Getting good practical advice is still hard but it’s doable, especially at Columbia Law. If you’ve already worked out the “should I?” questions in life, this school has world-class answers to the “how?” questions. PIPS and OPSC can show you how to get a job. Professors can show you how to analyze cases. Student organizations can show you how to live frugally and find community in New York. Kat’s Verdict advice column can show you how to find free food on campus.
The advice you find at CLS is good, but it’s more like the advice you’d get from Target’s customer service desk than the advice you’d get from a rabbi. Take advantage of this school’s deep wells of practical advice while steering clear of people telling you what to do with your life.
Daniel Bugingo is a 2L and a Writer for the Verdict.
[1] This is reflected in the cost of advice: Counselors and life coaches cost hundreds of dollars an hour while search engines have made instructions free (of course, people get free advice from friends and mentors, but you often get what you pay for).