Many of us picture commencement speakers giving variations of the “Take more risks, work hard, do good” speech. The good news is that the proportion of speeches that contain such advice seems to be going down. Understanding why is useful for all of us as we often end up giving others advice from time-to-time.
The trouble with generic advice is that it doesn’t work for a large group of people. Some people need to take more risks while others don’t. Some folks need to work harder to earn their privilege while others need to be careful about avoiding burn out. Such advice is easy to give – but is generally flawed because it is either self serving (quit college and start companies so I can invest in the best of them) or designed for people similar to the advice giver.
While the best advice is given once you understand a person and their proclivities, that doesn’t scale. The better approach, then, is to focus on principles. For example, a career principle might be to – invest in understanding yourself and use that understanding to make better decisions and develop good judgment.
The challenge with principles is that getting to them takes considerable thought – the sort that should be a pre-requisite to giving advice.
(H/T Julia Galef, Shripriya Mahesh for notes/discussions on this)
A Learning a Day 