stop taking advice

Dr. Phil the giver of adviceThere’s a ton of expertise out there. Trying to follow all of it will drive you crazy.

Do a quick search for your your area of interest or expertise and you’ll find site after site offering potent advice designed to help you do it better. I personally check Seth Godin, Copyblogger, American Copywriter, Signal vs. Noise, DesignNotes, and a hefty slate of others every day. And every day they offer me something valuable to consider when it comes to my own efforts.

But it can all be a bit much.

If you were able to follow — with total commitment — every available bit of good advice you literally couldn’t fail. That’s the nature of advice. Easily given, much harder to execute.

So here’s an idea: stop taking it. That doesn’t mean start ignoring it, but just stop taking so much of it in. Spend some time instead developing your own ways of solving problems. Get out there without really knowing what you’re doing and start making mistakes.

Then, learn from that.


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4 Responses to “stop taking advice”

interesting commentary neal that i could hardly disagree w/. hopefully though you still come visit DesignNotes once in a while.

Michael Surtees added this on Mar 18 08 at 9:18 pm

I just posted a comment on your site, Michael (everyone please read his post here).

I definitely didn’t include those links to suggest that people shouldn’t visit those sites. My actual intention was the opposite — to mention some sites I love.

I probably could have worded the transition better. So, yeah…I gotta learn by making those mistakes.

neal added this on Mar 18 08 at 10:48 pm

no worries neal, that’s how i took your post - sorry if i wasn’t clear about that. blog on…

Michael Surtees added this on Mar 19 08 at 5:08 am

I fully agree. There comes a point when, after you’ve researched till you think your head will explode, that you need to just start acting. More advice is always available. You can continuously read about best practices, tips, tricks and many other different things that are supposed to help you, but at some point, you need to cut the cord.

I love how you put it, “Get out there without really knowing what you’re doing and start making mistakes.” I always tell people that they’re never going to improve unless they start making mistakes, because you don’t learn that much from not messing up…so hurry up and get out there and start messing up! :)

morgan added this on Apr 07 08 at 11:23 am

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