Do you really want advice? In life? In financial matters? This question recently occupied my thoughts during a flight to Miami. A friend had asked me for advice on how to work better with her boss. Their relationship had become rocky, and she felt boxed in, cornered, and isolated. Yet, she loved her job and valued the impact she was making, even if she didn’t feel a strong connection with her boss.
As I began to type a response, I realized how little I knew of the whole situation. I wasn’t aware of how my friend presented herself at work, the expectations that had been set, met, or missed, or even her boss’s perspective on their relationship.
While I had plenty of ideas on ways to improve her work situation and strengthen her relationship with her boss, I realized that my advice would be incomplete. My recommendations would likely change—or should change—if I had more context. This led me down a long path of reflection about advice in general.
How valuable is incomplete advice? Isn’t all advice incomplete to some degree because we are always limited in knowing the full context?
Some might think I get stuck in decision paralysis, overanalyzing instead of taking action. But in truth, I tend to operate quite differently—I make quick, decisive, decisions and move forward, often with partial information. So, I couldn’t simply dismiss the value of advice just because context might be missing.
In my profession, I deal with financial advice and planning daily. A good financial planner gathers as much information as possible, aligning it with a client’s goals and aspirations to create a blueprint for success. However, a skilled planner also understands that a financial plan must be adaptable—goals change, information is often incomplete, and flexibility is key. Similarly, advice, like planning, should never be absolute.
This is also where the best financial advisors shine. They work with others in similar situation as you and can share those learnings with you. For instance, you haven to lived through retirement yet and neither has your advisor. Instead, they share retirement successes of others to help guide your journey.
But the question of advice continued to linger in my mind. It felt like there was a unexplored aspect I had been missing for decades. Fortunately, with a three-hour flight and no Wi-Fi, I had time to reflect.
I began reflecting on the best and worst advice I had ever received, considering who I sought advice from and whose advice I avoided. This exploration was fascinating. The best advice I had received fell into two categories: financial and family related. Some insights came from individuals who had achieved financial success, while others originated from those who had faced significant financial struggles. Similarly, in family matters, valuable advice came from both exemplary parents and those who had experienced great loss. This reinforced a familiar lesson—you learn just as much from failures as from successes.
However, the real revelation came when I examined the advice I didn’t want or follow. The first thing that came to mind was parenting advice. When I found out I was going to be a parent, I was flooded with advice about diapers, feeding, sleep routines, and everything in between. At the time, none of it resonated; it felt foreign, overwhelming, and irrelevant. I simply wasn’t ready to absorb it.
Yet, once my daughter was born, those same pieces of advice resurfaced in my mind at just the right moments—like three weeks into sleepless nights, for example. It wasn’t that the advice was bad; I just hadn’t been prepared to appreciate it until I experienced the situation myself. Parenting, unlike many other aspects of life, is something you must experience firsthand for most advice to truly make sense.
That’s when the realization struck me: advice isn’t about following instructions; it’s about understanding experiences.
When you seek advice, you can approach it in two ways:
- Seeking actual directives—what should I do?
- Seeking experiences—how did you handle this, and what did you learn?
The latter is where true wisdom lies. Instead of simply following advice, a leadership mindset challenges and applies insights from others’ experiences to one’s own unique situation. Following advice blindly reflects a follower’s mindset, while learning from others’ experiences to shape your own decisions embodies a leader’s approach.
This was the missing piece for me. Good advice isn’t about the advice itself; it’s about the experiences that led the advice-giver to their conclusions. That’s why people value insights from Michael Jordan about basketball or a seasoned business leader’s perspective on workplace dynamics—because their advice is rooted in deep, lived experience.
Returning to my friend’s situation, she wasn’t truly asking me what she should do. Instead, she needed to hear my experiences so she could extract valuable lessons and apply them to her own circumstances in a way that my direct advice never could.
So, next time you seek advice, remember you’re not looking for someone to tell you what to do. Real leaders don’t need to follow advice. Instead, you’re looking to learn from another’s experiences to forge your own path forward. As you design your life and finances, find those that can help guide you through their experiences to achieving your aspirations and goals.
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