Taking advice - Aaron's Essays

I ask for a lot of advice. Maybe too much. Sometimes the advice is great, sometimes it ends up seeming worthless and wrong. Invariably, I attributed the outcome of following advice to the giver - following advice from good people led to good outcomes, and vice versa. In the last few years, I've found myself giving a lot of advice and have realized how wrong I was in attributing cause and effect. There are two axes that determine the goodness of advice. The first is the obvious one: the quality of the person giving advice. This it the part which most often get discussed. We're told to seek out high quality mentors and advisors. These should be people who think clearly, have experience, have the time to think through problems and help. While these things might be hard to find in a single person, they're not typically that hard to evaluate. What's much harder, and probably more important, is the other axis: how good you are at describing reality to someone with much less context than you

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• Armel Talla