☕ saturday mornings - November 19, 2022

sweet life, wisdom of generations & the case against advice

Tommy Dixon

Nov 19, 2022

Happy Saturday!

I hope you’re having a great start to your weekend.

What I’ve been up to:

On Thursday I caught a flight to Morocco. I'm spending a day in Marrakesh then taking a van through the Altas Mountains and sleeping under the stars in the Sahara Desert.
This week, I've had Noah Kahan's album Stick Season on repeat.

Here's a recap of the most interesting things I've explored this week.

✍️ Quotes I’m pondering:

Emily Dickinson, American poet, on the transience of life:

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

📚 Book passage I loved:

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fulness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.
… So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.

― The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant

💡 Idea from me: Against Advice

Most advice sucks.

Advice can be measured on two dimensions: knowledge and knowledge of you.

We're pretty good at recognizing people who aren't knowledgeable, but we forget about the second factor: whether they actually know us. But, both are equally relevant.

As a result, we over-index on advice from "smart" or "experienced" people, who have no clue who we are or what we need (Quadrant 4).

The Internet is saturated with tweets, vlogs, and podcasts with snappy one-liners telling you how to live. What you "need" to do and when. (Lucky for the creators, they make millions, even if they don't follow a shred of their own teachings).

As Sahil Bloom writes, advice is often well-intentioned but it's dangerous to use someone else's map of reality to navigate yours—even if they're experienced. If you listen closely when people give advice they’re actually talking to younger versions of themselves. But, you're not the same person.

The self-help industry screams "you are not enough, you need more". As if the next bit of content will contain some life-altering secret, yet tomorrow morning you need to wake up and consume more.

Winners learn to filter and selectively implement advice. The best guidance is from a small handful of people that are both knowledgeable and know you.

From personal experience, heeding too much advice puts my mind in an industrial-grade Vitamix. It erodes trust in myself. I simultaneously become dependent on the words of others to put one foot in front of the other, and confused if I'm even walking in the right direction.

Advice from others mutes your voice—the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. "Either you think," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize, and sterilize you."

To discover the wisdom within your mind, silence is your ally. Intuition cannot be heard if it has to compete with external advice. "By limiting the inflow of other people's words and ideas," Julia Cameron notes, "it is possible to focus more clearly on your own. Without reading, talk radio, or television, you are able to hear yourself think. What the self has to say is often very interesting."

In the show 'Ted Lasso', Ted is asked for advice from a friend. He warmly responds: “Listen to me. Don't listen to me… You just listen to your gut, okay? And on your way down to your gut, check in with your heart. Between those two things, they'll let you know what's what.”

Clarity comes from inside. Trust yourself.

❓ Question for You:

A question from Tim Ferriss on personal finance:

Do I need to make it back the way I lost it?

If you lose $1,000 at the blackjack table, should you try to recoup it there? Probably not.

When it comes to losing money, it's easy to get tunnel vision, thinking you have to make it back in the same area you lost it. (Due to a cognitive bias called "anchoring").

First-hand, I’ve seen several investment firms try to "make it back how they lost it", holding onto poor investments in the hopes they turn around, instead of cutting their losses and doubling down on their winners.

I've found this question provides a helpful reframe.