The Three Laws of Advice

(These thoughts popped into my head while re-reading Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit, which is an interesting glimpse into her life and creative processes, but has a lot of stuff that just doesn't export well from Manhattan or dance, and feels kinda hack-y and interesting-but-shallow. I can't remember any "A-ha" moments from it. Plenty of such books are like that, and I wondered why. The answer clarified itself over the next couple of days.)

First Law. The probability of there being any good advice for you about how to do something is always strictly less than the chances of you being able to do it.

Second Law. The value of advice is inversely proportional to the product of the vagueness of what you are trying to do and the vagueness of how you are going to do it.

Third Law. Advice given by people who have been successful at something, about how to be successful at that thing, will always mention hard work, but will never mention genetic talent.

The first law is a no-brainer. If the chances of you being able to do something (win a Nobel Prize, write a song that's accepted by Taylor Swift, get a date with the girl of your dreams) are close to zero, there won't be anything anyone can tell you that will help you do it. That doesn't mean you might not luck in to a result, it means your mates won't be able to suggest how. If the chances of you being able to do something (make an omelette, clean your trainers, turn up to work five minutes early) are pretty good, there will be plenty of advice about how to go about it.

As for the second law, consider swimming. There is pretty much only one right way to swim freestyle (aka "front crawl"), and any variation is going to be sub-optimal. Teaching people to do the front crawl is about showing them how it is done, and then correcting their mistakes, or refining their technique, if your glass is half-full. It is a well-defined activity with a well-defined technique and a well-defined aim, and so has well-defined coaching. Now consider raising a child. There is not one right way to raise a child, because while children have some things in common, they also have a lot that is shared with only very few others, and their parents and teachers may not have seen before. Not only is the process highly variable, but the end result is highly variable: some will be mathematicians, some will be carpenter's wives. It is an activity with many aims and many ways of achieving those aims which will vary from person to person. So the advice is poorly-defined and not widely generalisable. To get well-defined advice, we would need to consider not "raising a child" but, say, "raising a teenage chess grandmaster" (step forward Mr Polgar).

The third law is about being really good at something, not just okay at it. Like it or not, some of us are born with a talent for drawing, or for playing the trumpet, or performing back-flips, or selling coals to Newcastle, or organising a bunch of people into an effective team, or cooking food, or making peace, and so on. Most of us are just okay-ish at all sorts of things, and a few are just no good at anything much, except getting in the way. Also there is money to be made from selling courses on music production or writing or sales techniques to people with no ability at any of it, and a common sales pitch of those courses is "anyone can do it, you just need determination and consistency", which sounds so plausible, and it really is not. Many people can put in the work and become competent, but there is a long distance between competence and creativity problem-solving.

Here's the catch. We want to believe that we can find those new friends, or that job, or that nice flat, or a partner who really gets us, make a living doing something interesting rather than grinding out a job, and decorate the flat in a comfortable and yet stylish way without spending a chunk of money, and so on. All the problems we really want to solve have poorly-defined aims or poorly-defined ways of solving them, and very few of us are blessed with the natural talent and drive to figure it out for ourselves.

When we try to add details to the aim, and get more clarity about what we need to do, the task can sometimes feel as if it is more attainable, other times feel as if we actually had no idea what we wanted, and sometimes we realise that it never was realistic. Worst of all, we realise that we actually have no idea what we really want, or we understand that what we want is not what we need.

(I leave to the reader as an exercise to apply the Three Laws of Advice to psychotherapy and how-to-do-life problems.)