I'm No Longer Giving Advice

Advice is fleeting and personal. The advice I would give to someone is only relevant to how that use case worked in my particular situation.

Let’s imagine I’m a roofer. I’ve been building roofs in Philadelphia for 10 years. Then I go online and someone asks the best way to install shingles.

What do I do?

I give them my advice. I tell them to buy a roofing gun and roofing nails and remind them only to shoot nails into the studs.

Sounds great. It’s damn good advice.

Well, it turns out the person asking for advice lives in Florida. In Florida, they don’t use the same shingles we do. They use clay shingles. They don’t even use wooden studs, it’s all steel studs.

My advice is useless.

Was my advice wrong? No. But it’s useless nonetheless.

This example shows how most advice is. It’s useless to the person who needs it, because advice can only be shared in context with experience.

So from now on, I am skipping the entire advice part, and going straight to experience.

If I share my experience, there’s no argument. “This is what happened to me.” There’s no debate, there’s no better way to do it. There is simply experience.

I think this is a better way.