On giving advice

Someone on X posted an engagement-bait-type question, but a good one: "What advice do you have for me for the new year?" One reply was this: "be skeptical of other people’s advice, which is very often aimed at rationalizing their own past choices, exerting power, or projecting their own concerns .... It’s in fact extremely [hard] to give another person advice apart from the banal and the obvious." 

To what extent is that reply true? Some thoughts below.

There are certain kinds of advice that are in principle easy to give, namely ones where the adviser has access to a communicable body of knowledge that the advisee does not. Professional advice is or at least ought to be in this category ("I advise you to take this medicine / to sue this person / to file your taxes by this date") but there are various other common instances too, such as local knowledge ("a good place to find a taxi / cheap restaurant / drugs is ...") or knowledge of social norms ("at a dinner party, it is best not to wipe your face with the tablecloth / praise Nigel Farage"). 

I want to leave these examples aside. The kinds of advice I am thinking of - as the people on X were - is what might be called advice for life. What advice can you give to make someone's life go better?

It is important to note that this category of advice includes a great deal of the advice given by trained professionals, i.e., advice given by people who are often good at giving advice. I am referring to advice given, not as not professional advice per se but rather advice about how to do their job, or do it better. Indeed, I suspect that advice on how to get on or do better, especially in educational or professional contexts, is some of the most keenly-sought advice out there, particularly when described as "feedback". But, although this advice is given by people who are, in the right context, good at giving advice, this kind of advice is very, very difficult to give. 

I know this from experience. I have been doing my job for a good few years and I am quite often asked for advice by people who want to do my job or have just started doing it. I often find myself reaching for banal and unhelpful clichés, or, worse, else mentally scrabbling around for anything positive to say. On being presented with a piece of work that is not very good then the advice I want to give is, as a friend once put it, simply "do better". "You made some bad points and missed all the good points" might be true, but it is not exactly actionable advice.

All of that said, giving life-advice is not impossible. Let's start with the fact that there is plenty of good advice that seems banal and obvious, but isn't. 

For example, perhaps the best advice to anyone sitting an exam is "answer the question", or, more precisely, "answer the question you've been asked and not the question you wish you had been asked". Of course, (a) everyone thinks they are answering the question and (b) everyone knows that they have to use the stuff they have been taught about the topic in order to answer the question about that topic that has come up, so what can you do? But it is good advice nonetheless. I was really quite old - and already reasonably good at passing exams - before I fully appreciated the meaning of "answer the question", before I 'grokked', so to speak, what was otherwise banal and obvious advice. 

There's something of the zen koan here, the incomprehensible statement that somehow leads to understanding of a deep truth. Although "answer the question" is outwardly comprehensible, it quickly seems incomprehensible qua advice: I am putting words in the box under the question! I am answering the question! What more do you want me to do?

I am also reminded of the MacNeice poem in which, after experiencing life, a man finds that "The truisms flew and perched on his shoulders". What is it that teachers do, and why do they have to be there in person, connecting with their charges, in order to do it? One answer might be that the achievement of a great educator is to use their voice, their turn of phrase, their presence - their whole person - to get truisms to fly around the heads of children in advance of meeting "Sordor, disappointment, defeat, betrayal". (The fact that, at least sometimes, an educator is attempting to bring the fullness of adult life into the minds of the young must play a part in the remarkably persistent belief that a romantic connection between teacher and pupil is, in some way, natural: think of The History Boys or the fascinatingly familiar story of "The Master", a teacher at Horace Mann back in the day.) To the extent that a truism is the distillation of the accumulated wisdom of generations then we should expect it to be good advice but not new advice.

On the other hand, some apparently banal and obvious advice is not merely a truism but given as a good faith attempt to allow others to learn from one's mistakes. An example of this that I see is the common advice to "prepare" or "prepare more" before going into court. 

At one level, giving this advice is stupid. No one sensible enough to have got a job as a barrister would ever dream of going before a judge without having prepared, a nervous junior barrister least of all, and that must be obvious to the older barrister offering the advice. So what's going on? 

My theory is that, at some point, the older barrister has faced an unexpected upset in court, perhaps a witness going off-piste or the judge asking a devastating question. That is always a horrible moment but, on this particular occasion, the development, although subjectively unforeseen, was in fact foreseeable if only they had prepared for it, by doing something differently beforehand, or thinking about the matter in a different way. They had prepared - perhaps they were over-prepared on other points - but they still missed something. What they really want to do is go back in time and tell their earlier self about this point, but all they can do is say "prepare more" in the hope that others avoid their mistakes.  

One of the quotations that I started with mentions advice that rationalises past choices. One does see that kind of advice (e.g., advice to go on courses from which the adviser "learned so much" but without that "so much" being explained) but the kind of advice I have been discussing is perhaps the opposite of that: it's criticising rather than defending past choices. In fact, I think we see other examples of this kind of "do as I say, not as I do" advice, although, as with "prepare more", perhaps it's not very useful. 

So, for example, "make time for your family - perhaps I worked too hard" is the kind of advice one might hear from a successful professional, but it's not telling the advisee how the adviser in fact became a successful professional, which is the only advice they can give, so who's to say it is good advice at all? "I could have been equally successful as a professional while making more time for my family" is a dubious claim and speculative at best. A better example of this kind of advice is "maintain a life outside work: I [climb / sing / run] regularly and am glad that I kept doing it", as at least that advice comes from experience rather than speculation, although we are still in the realm of the truism.

At the other end of the spectrum from the truism, there are various kinds of life-advice that are useful but only in particular cases. If, for example, you have a tendency to be disorganised then advice on introducing certain time-management or document-management techniques or tools could be life-enhancing, but for other people these thing swould be unnecessary or even distracting. It is perfectly possible for an educator to give advice of this kind: for example, over time, one might see that a junior barrister tends to use too many words or or too few, or to be too uncertain or too definite, and one might therefore be able to steer the advisee to the golden mean; but "use fewer words" or "be more definite in your views" are not pieces of advice of general application. 

That's the problem with pretty much all life advice: one size does not fit all. Some people need to get out more and others need to reduce their spending or alcohol intake; some people should read more books and others should do more exercise; some people need to save more for a rainy day, but others are tight-fisted misers.

If there were good, general, non-trite advice then it would have to be advice to correct universal failings in human nature. Is there such advice? The truisms come close. Of more modern forms of advice, "eat healthier foods and move around more" is also close: it's definite and helpful in a way that "prepare more" or "answer the question" aren't, and it's good advice for most people. But even that is not the right advice for everyone: some people need to paying less attention to their diet, rather than more, and would benefit from more sitting still, either in company or contemplation.

Perhaps the only general advice that is good advice for everyone is moral advice. (I suspect Kant has something to say on this subject, but I'll leave that to him.) Our moral failings are pretty much universal - more common even than being disorganised or long-winded - and mankind has spent long enough thinking about morality to have come up with some good advice on the subject. 

It's hard to reduce that advice to the character limits of X, but I did my best. I replied "Be good".