When good advice goes bad
Things can get ugly when good advice is used in the wrong context. (Photo by Mehdi on Unsplash)
The other day, the talented Alicia McKay asked her LinkedIn followers about the best career advice they’d ever received. The comments section took off, with people sharing a wide range of insights, from pithy and profound sayings (like ‘Attitude determines Altitude’ from Sunny Hwang-Visser), to longer-form reflections about how to succeed at work and in life.
The post struck a chord with me, because for a while I’ve been thinking about the instances when good advice turns bad. Like that saying about how ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’, I reckon we need a range of go-to insights and pieces of advice, so we can mix and match for the right occasion. A varied toolbox. Or a capsule wardrobe of advice, if you will.
In my own life, I’ve held fast to two pieces of advice that have sometimes made my life suck. The first, from my lovely high-school English teacher, was to ‘never hand in something that you’re not proud of’. The second, from a hockey coach, was to ‘leave it all on the field’. In other words, give the game everything you’ve got. You should walk off that field feeling absolutely spent.
Combine those two pieces of advice, and you get a bit of a mongrel. “Always hand in perfect work and make sure you wreck yourself in the process”. Um, what?
Because the thing is, the world of work isn’t really like a hockey game, or high school. Careers are really, really long, and the boundaries between work and everything else are getting blurrier by the day. Plus, if you work in consulting or any role that involves customers (ie, if you have a job), then you’ll know that there is always a trade off between the quality of a job, how fast you can do it, and the cost. It’s a triangle and you’re usually forced to pick two out of three options. Want something done fast and well? It will cost. Want something done fast and cheap? Sorry, but that’s when quality is going to give a little.
At times like this, you need other pieces of advice or rules of thumb to live and work by. Like a version of the Pareto principle – that 80% of the value comes from 20% of the work. So where can you focus in order to add value quickly and keep customers happy, without ruining yourself in the process?
Maybe the advice won’t even relate to the work at all, but it’ll help you to hold everything a bit more lightly. Like my dad’s advice when I didn’t get selected for a hockey team – it’s only one person’s opinion. Or when you’re at the centre of a drama – that today’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper. (Ok that probably doesn’t stack up in the days of Google search, but you get the idea).
Good advice turns feral when we just ‘copy and paste’ it from one context to another, without questioning whether it’s serving us well. What do you think? Have you seen examples of good advice turning bad? Let me know in the comments – unless your closely held advice is to never comment on public threads haha!
x Renee from Thrive Lab