The number one question people pose to someone they look up to is:

“Do you have any tips to give me?” or “What advice would you give a 19 year old?” or something in the similar vein.

It’s understandable. The person you’re talking to has done what you want to do, and you want them to share “advice” that will benefit you.

Except that this is often a terrible strategy of going about things, especially in the entrepreneurial world, at school, or if you’re trying to do anything creative.

As someone who’s constantly “asked for advice” and held to heart generic platitudes, I’ve found this out the hard way and wanted to elaborate on my own learnings.

Say you’re a 22 year old who has started numerous projects, all entrepreneurial ventures, in the past 4 years and though a few of them have gained traction, you haven’t been able to stick with one long enough to see its rewards actually come through.

Success takes time and it’s clear that your lack of focus has been a hindrance to your life. 

Now with that in mind, if you emailed a 50 year old multi-millionaire entrepreneur, asking him to give you his best piece of advice for someone your age, he might say something along the lines of “…never give up, keep trying, and work hard.”

Sounds all good right? All very respectable things to say, and likely very helpful too.

Except that in your head, you probably took this as “okay, I need to keep trying and working on more projects, as many as I can, and I will never give up! Sweet, awesome!”

Sure, you shouldn’t give up and you should definitely work hard, but in your case, the most important thing you can do is work hard on one thing, and to stick with that one thing for more than a month rather than to keep trying at numerous other projects.

The chances of you asking someone for advice and them saying exactly what you need to hear is very low and very hard to do.

Instead, there’s a much better option, and it’s what Uber CEO Travis Kalanick also mentions in his UCLA Talk.

The Power of Learning from Experiences

Learn from people’s experiences, not their advice.

A story isn’t binary or narrow like many pieces of advice are – it can be interpreted in infinite ways, and thus different people who need different advice are much more likely to learn from it.

For example, let’s come back to our young entrepreneur asking advice example – let’s say the guy he asked advice to instead recounted the following experience:

“..No one was replying to my emails, but I kept going and finally found a company willing to look at my prototype. I thought that no one was going to pay me money for it, but after validating certain features and getting rid of others, I stuck with my idea and found out what worked & what didn’t. Keep in mind that I did for almost a year before anyone actually paid me money.”

Now, yes, I’ve obviously exaggerated that to an extent to make the experience abundantly clear, but it’s so true.

The entrepreneur who listens to that “story” versus the earlier “advice” rapidly learns a truth that is so much more valuable to him. He realizes that he needs to spend more time focusing on his projects one by one, rather than switching merely 1 or 2 months after they initially get no success.

Further, another young entrepreneur listening to the same story could have learned something completely different from that story, yet just as valuable for himself.

He could have learnt the value of constantly iterating one’s product and adapting to the needs of his audience, or about the need to email more than just 1 or 2 companies before giving up, or about product validation.

Think of “learning from experiences” versus “learning from advice” as just increasing your odds of hearing the right thing.

Much like it can only take one book to change your life, you only need one tidbit, crumb of value from someone’s story to propulse you in the right direction or to recognize the one thing that’s been holding you back. And you’re much likely to get it through listening to their experiences rather than generic advice.

Another example of this can be seen in school. Say you’re trying to raise your GPA and you go to your super smart friend with the high GPA. He might say “I work really hard and make sure I get started on my work early.”

The “experience” version of this might be:

“I realized that staying up till 2am didn’t mean I worked hard. It meant that I was not organized enough to do my work earlier at optimal concentration. I downloaded extensions such as StayFocused and limited my time to 60min starting off for social media and gradually incrementing down to 20min per day now.”

Here, the distinction may be that working hard doesn’t necessarily mean staying up till 2am (though it very well might for someone) and there’s no spending hours “studying” in front of your computer if you’re logging on Facebook every 15 minutes.

Ultimately, listening to someone’s experience is just the same as getting really actionable, specific advice if you interpret it correctly. The chart below provides two more examples of generic advice vs experience based learning:

Actually Implementing This

This is the hard part, especially when you’re in front of someone you admire and only have a few minutes to pick their brains. The best way to generate experience based answers from then is to do just that, ask about their specific experiences rather than higher level questions. This normally means that you have to have done your research on them as well – don’t ask Steve Jobs about “advice on starting a company based on his experience at Apple.” Ask him to “share how he was able to contribute to Apple’s early beginnings despite being relatively non-technical and how this affected his relationship with co-founder Wozniak.”

An even better way to learn from experiences though is to read biographies. Now, there are good biographies and there are bad biographies, but most of them are almost entirely experience based (they do recount someone’s life after all). Instead of much of the “rah-rah” generic motivational advice many other mediums provide, biographies let you do the work of deciphering what you want to read and ignore yourself.

Other great mediums include finding talks on Youtube (these are good because the interviewer normally asks for background that allows for much of this experience based jazz to come in) and listening to good, high quality podcasts.

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I really enjoyed writing this post, and would love to hear from you if you have any questions or comments about it (or really anything else on this site for that matter). Reach out to me here.