January 21, 2025
Or: why you should probably read less advice.
Here is a personal anecdote: in 6th grade, my science teacher had us watch a TED Talk on growth mindset. Being 11 and an age-appropriate amount of overconfident, I thought the whole concept was stupid: obviously we should all believe in bettering ourselves, who was this advice even for? I only really felt the difference my freshman year at Stanford, when I realized that stagnation and fear was indeed shaping the things I confronted and avoided. It turns out that “growth mindset” is a personally useful abstraction after all.
I feel that I’ve grown up a lot these past 2-3 years. A particularly prominent change has been that my abstractions feel different, and much more deeply settled than before. I am much less certain of many “truths” about life than I was in my teens1; I think of this as overcoming the first (of many, gradually smaller?) Dunning-Krueger peaks. I have embraced some ideas that I previously dismissed on an intellectual level (“you can just do things” is a big one, “believe in yourself” among other cliches2, “it feels scary to believe in an empty and godless universe”), although it took time to re-orient myself; it turns out that older and wiser people were right about some things, to the dismay of my contrarian teenage self. I have also arrived at reformulated understandings of big ideas (empathy, self-expression, community3). I imagine this will keep happening as I get older. It seems that understanding is recursive, and there is truth that I don’t yet have enough lived experience to engage with.
In general I have realized there is a deep chasm between theory and practice. Theory is abound in textbooks and autobiographies and life advice blog posts and classic novels. You can consume it at will, and crucially, you can become fluent enough in the common abstractions to fool yourself. Practice is the visceral tendencies of your lizard brain, the intuitive signals of truth, your independent discovery of subjective sensations, the ability to wrangle and act on beliefs. It is extremely easy to claim an intellectual understanding of something – “equanimity”4, “addiction”, “love”, “self-acceptance” – but not actually understand beyond the surface. This is when ideas are easiest to prematurely dismiss. When you internalize the practice, the descriptions from theory usually still feel very accurate, and yet there exists leagues more depth than you ever imagined, a veritable dark matter of truth.
The domain where I feel this most is advice, especially life advice5. Language is just an abstraction, and language itself does not encapsulate the cavernous depths of truth. Rather, language, especially advice, is a pointer to some cluster of ideas living in mindspace. For this reason, advice is much more useful for the writer than the average reader. The writer crystallizes, with our language’s limited expressiveness, a representation of the idea-cluster that feels true for their own mental models. The readers can only make sense of the advice with respect to their own (likely) weaker instances of said idea-cluster, and perhaps not at all. I can only hope that you, the reader, related to some of these ideas even before you found this essay.
Good, accurate advice often sounds extremely simple on the surface; every word makes sense, at least as an intellectual exercise. But if it does not immediately resonate, it is easy to find some rationalization for not following it, and to dismiss it from a purely theoretical basis. Sure, Stanford is a platform6, but this is only useful if you already understand what “sense of direction” means, and can not just see but act against the preprofessional “gravitational pull”. My ballet teacher had all sorts of analogies, like “feeling a string from the top of your head to the ceiling”, or “feeling the resistance of moving through slime”, which were hit or miss as pointers to the sensations of good technique. It took me moving to another country to actually feel the invisible orthodoxy that defines the limits of “normal”. My point is, without good practice for the prerequisite ideas, it’s hard to get mileage from consuming advice.
People who truly understand a statement of advice usually share similar-ish representations and idea-clusters, which can be retrieved by some set of shallow-sounding pointers. A well-articulated pointer can even elicit half-formed instances of the idea-cluster, and is thus useful to people sufficiently far along the discovery path. But it seems implausible to me that any pointer, even if very detailed, can stand in for the underlying ideas. For this reason I am skeptical of language-only strategies for changing one’s mind. In my life, by far the most effective way to internalize new ideas has been to semi-blindly act on them, and the most useful advice I’ve read has been explicitly action-oriented (example, another example). I try to act in the right direction – overriding fear by doing adrenaline sports, or practicing thought-to-action execution on small tasks – as a form of exposure therapy.
It’s hard to accept that not everything can be learned directly from a book. But in a way, it’s also beautiful that the experience of life itself contains the most elusive truths.
Here are some related ideas (thank you Neil, Kevin):
from Zoe: “Every cliche quote is like so real. Like I’m like 🤯🤯 don’t give up 🤯🤯🤯 so true” ↩
Empathy: I feel more strongly the emotional sensation of empathy; the classic “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” used to feel more like an exercise of imagination. Self-expression: I understand that the embers of self-expression are deep within ourselves (duh) and we cultivate it through curiosity; even my college self, pre-Berlin, had a much more obfuscated understanding of self-expression, where it came from, and who was “good at it”. Community: In my adult life I feel the desire for comfort, familiarity, and casual human connection, much more than I did as a (dramatic, always surrounded by peers) teenager. I think I’m less emotional than average, so a big part of this has been being attuned to the emotional component of ideas. ↩
I’m not a meditation person but I think the concepts that people who meditate share (the void, equanimity, etc.) are a great illustration of “words that sound surface-level simple but contain depth that is incomprehensible to me” ↩
This is also semi-true for “tacit knowledge”/technical advice, i.e. certain things won’t make sense until you have internalized the right models, and sometimes that internalization really does only come with hands-on experience. Still, I think the absorption of practical advice is mostly context-limited: it would ring true if you had the right context, perhaps bolstered by practical experience, to understand the claim ↩
this is the best advice I have read about Stanford. I regret that I didn’t find it sooner, but I also don’t think I had strong enough conceptions of “meaningful work” and “action with intention” ↩