Let Me Give You a Little Piece of Advice. Ignore It.
by James Ahlers on February 12, 2008 in Opinion
As I near the end of four intense years of graduate education, I find myself in a reflective mood. Like many of you, I am about to start a new career. These transition times offer the rare blessing of a few quiet moments to contemplate where we are and where we want to be.
Savor the quiet, because your ears will soon ring with the din of unsolicited career advice. Everyone knows what is best for you, and they are eager to take your hand and guide you along the path to success, kind of like Jesus in that poem about the beach.
When Henry David Thoreau turned thirty, he remarked that he had never received valuable or earnest advice from his elders. Bad advice is not easily defined, but like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said of hard-core pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Often, we know advice was poor only in hindsight, when we wonder how we’ve come to inhabit that lonely cubicle in the windowless building, surrounded by a boss who makes Michael Scott (or David Brent if you’re British) seem a paragon of competence and co-workers who make Bartleby the Scrivener look like the life of happy hour.
I’ve received my share of bad, unsolicited career advice over the years. So I humbly offer a few red flags from my own experience that may help you spot lousy counsel before you fall victim to it.
The advisor is projecting his/her own hopes and fears onto you. The night before I accepted my first real job as a newspaper reporter in Kansas City, I received an unexpected phone call. An old friend from Chile called and invited me to visit for a while. I was 22 and had barely been outside Ohio. I knew I had to go.
The editor I turned down saw it differently. “You’re going to ruin your career.” His advice was not an insight into my career path; it was the tired product of the predictability of his own and his inability to imagine a different one. These are the people Supertramp warned us about in “The Logic Song.” They wouldn’t dare do anything risky and they want to indoctrinate us to be equally “sensible and logical.”
Advice is a value judgment disguised as simple logic. When I got into Harvard Law School, I struggled at the thought of rejecting a full ride to a very good state university law school. I sought and received thoughtful advice from many friends and colleagues, but the unsolicited advice of an attorney who had attended the state university stood out.
He suggested I would be silly to pass up the scholarship. Without the slightest hint of humor, he remarked, “They use the same books at Harvard.” Compelling logic, if you picture law school as three joyless years shackled to a library cube, devoid of the inspirational value of professors, fellow students and out-of-class learning. Such nuggets of wisdom are just oversimplified truisms: you must work on Capitol Hill if you want to make it anywhere in politics. You must go to Gino’s East in Chicago to get truly delicious deep-dish pizza. (OK, the second one is true.)
The advisor has his/her own reasons for wanting to hold you back. I stayed three years in Chile before returning to the States to find a newspaper job and live closer to my growing gaggle of nieces and nephews. The publisher of the magazine I wrote for at the time warned me I would be throwing away my talent on some corporate rag instead of fighting the good fight by writing about human rights issues in Chile. In truth, he hoped I would take over the day-to-day operation so he could spend more time on his farm and I botched his plans. When bosses or colleagues warn you against a certain career move, ask yourself what their motives are.
At times, I’ve received good advice from those I trust most. I’ve had bosses that encouraged me to seize new opportunities even when it was not in their self-interest, and colleagues who supported my decision to make moves they would never make, but that seemed right for me.
But often, the market for unsolicited personal advice is a bit like the market for used cars. If the car is so great, the lemons problem asks, why is the owner selling it? If advice is so sage, why is someone offering it for free? Which brings us to the question: why should you heed my advice about heeding advice?
You shouldn’t. You should take your own counsel. Of the lousy advisors he had, Thoreau remarked, “Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it.” He knew, as those closest to me did, that it’s up to us to pen the book of our life.
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