Unsolicited advice

After a talk I gave once this last year, a man came over and told me I ought to automate all my coaching using AI to free up my time. The irony is that I was giving a talk on being Human-to-Human in the midst of an AI boom.

I nodded for about 4 seconds and couldn’t decide if this was a joke or not.

Then, I asked him where he learned it.

He said he had spent years at a company that got rid of him a year earlier; recruiters had stopped contacting him; and he decided the only safe position was to learn how to automate everything. He had been saying this to everyone ever since.

Most advice isn’t a prescription; it’s a confession.

People hand you the advice they need. Somehow that’s never the rude part.

I see this in my conversations with leaders. The person tells me the team is still making the same error, then goes on to tell me what they have told the team about it.

They use exactly the same words, the same tone, and yet they make no progress.

By the sixth time, they were talking to themselves.

Try this. When someone gives you advice you didn’t ask for, don’t defend and don’t perform gratitude.

Ask them: where did you learn it? Five words.

Watch them slow down. Once you are no longer a project, they stop being experts, and the point they wanted to make finally arrives.

It doesn’t work all the time. Sometimes they get it from a podcast or an experience they turned into their life’s mission. That’s all right. It’s theirs to keep. I usually find something worth hearing.

Back to the automate-everything-with-AI guy… if you ask an AI what to do, you’ll get the average of everything ever written on the topic, neatly presented in two seconds, with no spark or originality.

Human advice is inconvenient for the same reason it’s worth having. It always comes from their own experience.

Stay human
-Bryan

P.S. What unsolicited advice did you get that wasn’t about you?