Granularity: How to Give Better Advice

This is from my series on Optimizing Communication.

“Only hire rock stars!”

We’re two weeks into our incubator burning through our meager seed funding and that’s the advice that’s supposed to help?

The people who know me know that I’m obsessed with optimizing and improving. I consume a lot of information on this topic and one thing I’ve realized is that I hate advice that is super broad. It’s the Twitter-style pithiness that sounds profound but then you realize you don’t know how to take any action on it. It’s like hearing a motivational speaker and feeling super pumped up about finally changing but then it’s a week later and you realize your life still sucks and you’ve done nothing about it. Broad advice can be useful for people but I think it’s almost always made better by providing examples with hyperspecific granular steps.

I’ll give you an example from the startup world.

Normal crappy advice people give: “Talk to the people who can help you solve your problem.”

What?!

How do I find them? Can I type “person who solved this business problem” into Google and get a spreadsheet with their names and contact information?? Let’s say I do identify them. Their email isn’t publicly listed. Their Twitter doesn’t allow DMs. Do I publicly tweet at them? Stalk them outside their work?

Actually useful granular advice:

• Beef up your LinkedIn account by filling in all the sections. Have someone good at writing help you if you suck.
• Type “blockchain” into LinkedIn to get a list of people. Send a reachout message explaining your background and how you’d love to meet up and get their advice about something or “jump on” a Skype or Zoom call (tech people love to use the term “jump on a call”).

I wasn’t joking. Those are actual screenshots from my email.

Normal crappy advice: “Spend less time on social media! It’s all fake! Be present in the real world.”

Granular advice: Mindless scrolling can be a symptom of not being fulfilled in other ways. Do a trial of not going on social media for a week.  Schedule two socializing activities and see if your compulsion to flit on Facebook is as strong afterward.

Other options:

• Delete the Facebook and Instagram apps.
• Make a complicated new password and put it in a sealed envelope and throw it in the back of your closet.
• Install News Feed Eradicator for Facebook. That way you can check your messages and notifications without seeing the newsfeed and being sucked into scrolling.
• Install a blocking extension like Block Site. 

You can always get deeper and deeper into abstraction like “How do I figure out what to beef up my LinkedIn account with?” or “How do I write better?” but I think striving to provide some level of granularity is good.

I know that there are neurotic advice-seekers who want to be told every little detail without having to think about it for themselves or have the underlying goal in mind. I’m sure some of this can be motivated by laziness but a lot of it seems to come from a neurotic personality. Keeping it broad isn’t helping them much either way.

Some people are attracted to super broad advice. My hypothesis is that these are the people attracted to more abstract bullshit in general. Stuff that they can read into without making concrete progress on any of their actual goals. Let’s not enable them either.

A healthy list:

1 Get more sleep
2 Make time to exercise
3 Drink more water
4 Eat less sugar
5 Stay teachable
6 Read and write more
7 Remove clutter
8 More random acts of kindness
9 Do not respond to negativity
10 Spend quality time with family
11 Show gratitude
12 Forgive first

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) June 11, 2019

Stuff like this. Do people really not know these are good things? Yes, I know it’s Twitter so you can say that’s what it’s for but still.

Being more concrete is helpful in many domains. Being specific and moving in the direction of granular advice can help show where there may be gaps in what you know and what someone else doesn’t. So when giving advice, try to provide granular steps and examples to help people understand. I disagree with the Judith Butler outlook that people should be straining themselves to try to understand and apply what you’re saying.

So here are some steps when giving advice:

• Be more specific. Can you break this down into more steps that would make it easier for someone to apply? 
• Think of common reasons why people don’t already do this. E.g. How do I lose weight? “Exercise more.” Everyone knows exercise is good for them. Saying this provides no value. Compare “Exercise more” with “Spend some time trying different types of exercise to see which ones you like most. Not all exercise is running or lifting. Sports can be more fun and get you in the habit of exercising. Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Muay Thai can also teach you how to fight and help you get in the habit of exercising.”
• Provide examples of how you or someone else would apply this advice. E.g. How do I have better relationships? “Utilize the power of reinforcement more. Instead of nagging someone about how they never call you the one time they do call you, make it a really positive experience and say how much you enjoy talking to them.”

Conversely, you can also go through that list and use it to think about how you can apply changes from broad advice.

That said, do you have a good piece of advice or recommendation? Do you know how to solve a problem or can you suggest some good resources to do so? I’d love to hear about it!

Further reading: 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NgtYDP3ZtLJaM248W/sotw-be-specific

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JcpzFpPBSmzuksmWM/the-5-second-level

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TappK5n3kZmQzWEWD/recommendations-vs-guidelines

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XosKB3mkvmXMZ3fBQ/specificity-your-brain-s-superpower

This has wonderful, granular advice on dieting: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TappK5n3kZmQzWEWD/recommendations-vs-guidelines#eydrCSqyWmi9MWCKE

Spencer Greenberg’s Facebook feed is a gold mine. Just keep scrolling down: https://www.facebook.com/spencer.greenberg

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