Tuesday morning, September 30th. Watching someone implement their fifth contradictory productivity system from internet gurus, and realizing that our addiction to advice might be preventing us from developing actual judgment.

The Advice Delusion

Here's an uncomfortable truth: most advice is useless, and the rest is actively harmful. Not because people giving advice are malicious or incompetent, but because advice treats solutions as portable when they're actually deeply embedded in specific contexts, personalities, and circumstances that can't be replicated.

The advice trap convinces us that other people's solutions can become our solutions if we just follow the right steps. But success leaves clues that are misleading, failure is systematically hidden, and what worked for someone else usually won't work for you—not because you're implementing it wrong, but because the conditions that made it work for them don't exist for you.

We've built an entire economy around the fantasy that wisdom is transferable. It isn't. Experience might be transferable, frameworks might be transferable, but the judgment about which experiences and frameworks apply to your specific situation? That can only come from you.

The Survivorship Machine

The advice industry runs on survivorship bias so complete it's almost invisible. Every successful person attributes their success to specific practices, decisions, and philosophies. But for every successful person doing X, there are hundreds of unsuccessful people who also did X. The difference isn't the practice—it's everything else that made the practice work in that specific context.

The billionaire CEO tells you to wake up at 4am. What they don't tell you is that they have personal assistants handling logistics, no young children waking them up at night, genetic predispositions toward being morning people, and work that provides immediate feedback and rewards. You implement their morning routine and just end up exhausted, because none of those supporting conditions exist in your life.

This isn't about individual deception—most advice-givers genuinely believe their methods caused their success. It's about systematic blindness to the contextual factors that made those methods effective. The successful person focuses on what they did differently, not on all the circumstances that were similar between them and other successful people.

The result is advice that sounds actionable but is actually cargo-cult ritual: copying the surface behaviors of successful people while missing the structural conditions that made those behaviors productive.

The Generic Solution Problem

Most advice fails because it aims for universal applicability. To reach the largest audience, advice must be general enough to theoretically work for anyone. But the more general the advice, the less useful it is for any specific person in any specific situation.

"Work hard." "Find your passion." "Network strategically." "Focus on what matters." These sound like wisdom, but they're just platitudes. They're true in the sense that they're hard to disagree with, but they provide no actionable guidance about what to actually do in your specific circumstances.

The advice that might actually help you is so specific to your situation that it would be useless to everyone else. You need to know whether to quit your job or stay, whether this specific relationship is worth fighting for, whether your particular project deserves more investment or should be abandoned. Generic advice can't answer these questions because the answer depends entirely on details the advice-giver doesn't know.

But specific advice doesn't scale, so the advice industry optimizes for generic advice that can be packaged, sold, and consumed en masse—even though that advice is systematically less useful than figuring out your own situation.

The Experience Substitution

The real function of advice isn't to provide solutions—it's to substitute other people's experience for your own judgment. When you consume advice, you're outsourcing the work of thinking through your own situation to someone who doesn't actually understand your situation.

This feels efficient. Why learn through expensive trial and error when you can learn from other people's mistakes? But this efficiency is an illusion. You can learn facts from other people's experience, but you can't learn judgment. Judgment only develops through making your own decisions, observing the results, and refining your models of how things work in your specific context.

Every hour you spend consuming advice is an hour you could spend developing your own judgment through action and reflection. The advice-consumer becomes increasingly confident that they know what to do while their actual judgment atrophies from disuse. They collect frameworks, acronyms, and principles without developing the ability to judge which ones apply when.

The person who ignores advice and just tries things, fails, reflects, and tries again builds calibrated judgment. The person who follows advice builds a collection of other people's judgment that may or may not apply to their situation.

The Certainty Seduction

Advice also provides false certainty in situations where uncertainty is appropriate. When you face a difficult decision, advice tells you there's a right answer if you just follow the right framework or implement the right system. But most important decisions involve trade-offs where there is no objectively correct choice, only different sets of consequences you'll need to live with.

The advice-seeker wants someone to tell them what to do so they can avoid responsibility for the outcome. If it works, they succeeded by following good advice. If it fails, the advice was bad or they implemented it wrong. Either way, they've avoided confronting the fundamental uncertainty of their situation.

But this avoidance prevents learning. When you take responsibility for a decision—making it based on your own judgment rather than someone else's advice—you learn from the outcome in a way that actually improves your judgment. When you follow advice, success and failure both just teach you to keep looking for better advice rather than developing better judgment.

The most valuable skill isn't finding the right advice—it's developing the judgment to know when advice applies and when you need to figure things out yourself.

The Context Collapse

Perhaps the deepest problem with advice is that it collapses context. Advice takes what worked in one specific situation—with its particular constraints, opportunities, personalities, and circumstances—and presents it as a general principle that should work anywhere.

But most of what determines whether something works isn't the thing itself—it's the context surrounding it. The startup advice that works in San Francisco's venture capital ecosystem doesn't work for bootstrapped businesses in other cities. The relationship advice that makes sense for people with certain attachment styles and relationship histories doesn't make sense for people with different backgrounds. The productivity advice that works for neurotypical people without caregiving responsibilities doesn't work for everyone else.

Context isn't just details—it's often the entire explanation for why something works or doesn't. And context is precisely what gets stripped away when experience becomes advice.

The person giving advice genuinely wants to help, so they generalize their experience into principles. But that generalization process removes the very specificity that made their experience relevant. What you get is advice that sounds wise but doesn't apply to your situation, and you'll never know whether the advice was bad or you just implemented it in the wrong context.

The Alternative Path

The alternative to advice isn't ignorance—it's learning to build judgment rather than collecting other people's conclusions. This means:

Study principles, not prescriptions. Learn how things work rather than what to do. Understand the dynamics of negotiation rather than memorizing negotiation tactics. Study how businesses fail rather than following startup advice. Principles transfer across contexts; prescriptions don't.

Experiment cheaply. Instead of asking what you should do, run small experiments to see what happens in your specific situation. Test and learn rather than implement and hope. Build your own data about what works for you rather than relying on other people's data about what worked for them.

Analyze your own experience. After you try something, reflect on why it worked or didn't. What contextual factors mattered? What assumptions were right or wrong? What would you do differently next time? This reflection builds judgment in a way that consuming advice never can.

Seek information, not recommendations. Ask people about their experience, the trade-offs they faced, the factors they considered—but make your own decisions. Use their information to inform your judgment rather than substitute for it.

The goal isn't to reject all advice or pretend you can figure everything out alone. The goal is to treat advice as information rather than instruction, as one input to your judgment rather than a replacement for judgment.

Tuesday Morning Practice

Think about an area where you've consumed lots of advice without getting meaningful results. Maybe productivity, relationships, career, health—wherever you've tried multiple systems or frameworks without breakthrough.

Stop consuming advice in that area for one month. Instead, run your own experiments. Try things that seem reasonable based on your understanding of your situation. Pay close attention to what happens. Reflect on why things work or don't. Build your own theories about what matters in your specific context.

Track your results. You'll likely find that your self-directed experiments teach you more in one month than years of consuming advice ever did—not because your experiments are better, but because you're building judgment rather than collecting prescriptions.

The best advice anyone can give you is to stop taking so much advice. Not because you can figure everything out alone, but because the kind of wisdom you need can only be built through your own experience and reflection. Other people's solutions are data points, not answers. Your judgment about which data points matter and how they apply? That's the real work, and no advice can do it for you.

The advice trap isn't that learning from others is wrong—it's that we've confused consuming other people's solutions with developing our own judgment. Real wisdom comes from understanding principles and building context-specific judgment through experimentation and reflection. Most advice fails not because it's wrong, but because it strips away the context that made it work, leaving you with generic prescriptions that don't account for your specific situation. Stop collecting advice and start building judgment. The answer to your problems won't come from someone else's experience—it will come from your own thoughtful engagement with your specific circumstances.