whoops, pasted the wrong text in my comment above. Here's the url to my post:

http://www.happinessinthisworld.com/2009/11/08/how-to-give-and-receive-feedback/

Hi Penelope,

Solid advice. The one that "Less experience often means better advice" if find to be particularly important. I know a lot of people who have only trust o take advice from people which are way beyond their current status. I guess it's an ego thing. But counter-intuitively, those people do not offer the best advice, as they are too disconnected from your experience.

Eduard

I like the last point. Sometimes advice you think is "bad advice" is the best advice. For example, some say you should only apply to jobs you're a perfect fit for, or jobs you went to college for. Rubbish. The best opportunities will likely be outside of your comfort zone.

Asking for help bruises my ego for sure….but you are absolutely right!!!

You say: "In some respects, bad advice might be better than good advice. Because what you really want is advice that makes you think in new ways about possibilities for yourself."

I liked all these principles for gathering career advice, but thought an example for your last point would have helped a lot. Maybe a post about how to make bad career advice helpful would be a good idea for the future.

Comments regarding each piece of advice…

1. I think that the stronger point regarding this issue is that one needs to consult a plurality of sources (and therefore, a plurality of perspectives). This is asserted boldly in the discussion of the fifth point, and rightly so. Each perspective comes with its distortions: Those close to you (who care) may share your farsightedness, and often have their own ideas about what is "good" for you; those who detest you must struggle with their desire to see you undone; and those with nothing at stake have no incentive to produce pointed advice and criticism (like Bill Gates).

2. I think that your second point carries a certain dangerous implication, namely, that values and purposes are not highly subjective. Ultimately, it is the sort of advice undercut by assertions about personal values, personal decisions, and personal responsibility. I really do not see how one can have it both ways. However, incitements to humility are quite admirable, especially where one's self-styled "problems" are at issue. That alone makes this point worth reading.

3. I would only add that, contrary to what is often stated, experience is an intrinsically hazardous thing when advice is the game. Experiences entail biases, and beget biases. Biases may not always be harmful (or even unhelpful), but they still represent unsound thinking. It cannot be demonstrated that experience is a simple improvement of understanding, or that experience involves a unilateral improvement of understanding.

4. This seems intuitively true, as people are always and everywhere imperfect. The image of a perfect life is a façade, or even worse, an icon set up for worship. The above invocation of celebrity stories tells that tale, and tells it well: worship and iconoclasm.

5. The rather pessimistic angle to this, which you may have tacitly hinted at, is that both good and bad advice come at serious costs. Good advice, particularly that given over a long period of time, lulls one into a sense of reliance and dependency on others — often on those who have rather unsettling agendas, who only want the "best" for us. On the other hand, few people would deny that, in the short run, good advice is to be preferred the majority of the time. Bad advice is, by way of analytical truth, bad. Typically this matter is far more straightforward, but the issues of personal values, personal accountability, and general ethics (not to mention knowledge problems!) make the subject far richer and more complicated. Mind you, that all assumes individual autonomy *is* a proper part of our worldview, but I think that is a fair assumption to make.

All in all, these points are fine pieces of advice to tease through, provided one is aware of the issues pertaining to self-referential (in)consistency. Penelope certainly is — that rascally ironist, she!

This are great ideas on how to get a career advice. Getting some criticism tends to give up or lose some of self-confidence on choosing your career but accepting those bad criticism if you analyze it gives you a better insight on your career path in life. Be more open to any possibility for a change on your career where you can excel your capability and capacity.

Great post on a career advice!

I used to be "unafraid" to ask for advice. After a little while, someone told me that I seem incompetent when I ask for so much advice. Have you or someone you know ever asked for too much advice?

Thanks for the reply. I'll keep it in mind.

this is counterintuition gone WAY too far- everyone should know that the only decisions that matter are those whose benefits outweigh its costs. These kinds of decisions are the best because they create a way to value things on different scales, and make up their mind to see what is the best choice. Humans do make mistakes, but we think they are mostly rational. In a normal distribution of the population of humans, 99.5% of the population, or three standard deviations away, is rational, and then the rest are irrational. That means there are as many irrationals as there are extremely rich from finance, top of their kind in their career, getting stung by bees to death, and winning the lottery. Interesting comparisons huh?

"When it comes to finding a mentor, the most effective mentors are 3-5 years ahead of you in the workplace."
The best advice I got today: gaining objectivity with still-fresh memory. Thank you!

I also think the point of asking advice is to gain an entry point into disassembling the tangled thoughts on our career or life: we do our own explorations, but it is good to have someone showing us the easy way to go in.

The only piece I disagree with is the celebrities bit. Which celebrities? Lindsey Lohan? Russell Crowe? I think a more fruitful avenue may be reading biographies of people whom you admire, not necessarily people who have been successful. You may learn not only from their character traits, but also from their strategies and techniques, both where these approaches worked and where they didn't.

Fortunately, your advice runs counter to everything I "learned" in the workplace. I learned never to ask for advice… unless you're stoking some big guy or gal's ego. Asking for advice is weak. Come to the table with answers, not questions. What a crock that was.

I intuitively knew this was wrong, and eventually I had to leave – after 18 years.

The problem is that it sticks with you, that self-made (wo)man image. I don't believe anyone is self-made. People learn from others, but I think oasis is right. Many people won't help because they don't want competition, or they resent giving help if they didn't get enough.

As a career transformation coach, I work with individuals who are wanting to create change in their worklife. So, like the examples you gave, and so many others have posted about, we naturally seek advice from one another or the internet or whatever other source we think might come up with a gem. We want the answers. But there is no one more influential in our life than we are, which means, for all the advice we get, we still make the decisions that we think are the best for us. So, I just wanted to add one more consideration into the mix: self-inquiry.

As you shared, Penelope – it is about asking good questions. Ask others AND ask yourself good questions. Better yet, hire a good coach because that is one of the huge benefits that good coaching offers – someone to ask you questions that bring you deeper into the wisdom you already have about what is right for you. You put that together with all the advice you gather and you have a formula for career success!

Penelope> Glad you found a purpose to keep blogging. I love your blog or, as a friend of mine says, "I'm pickin' up what you're puttin' down."

This is the best site for search u r job.

Great post on a career advice!