Socien's Blog

I believe that you are vulnerable when you need advice. It is, therefore, vital for you to investigate closely your sources of help, inside and outside. If an advisor is telling you to adopt one strategy over the other, you need to have known and questioned:

• What resources do they expect me to have? You might be earning a year when they are expecting at least a thousand a year. When you ask someone who has gone through a path you still need to go through, you are asking not only for advice but his experience and what it took for him to achieve.
• What connections and skills you might need to have before you adopt their strategy?
• Do they share the same mindset with you? In most cases, people will tell you that it won’t work because they don’t have the same guts as you. For example, I have fewer chances of getting advice that is not misleading from a person whose mindset is all about starting a company when mine is all about finding a job or vice versa.
• Are the same conditions needed for your success to happen the same as they and their references needed to succeed? Because you might need more luck, or any other factors that are not in your control, than they did during their days or vice versa. You also need to know what to do for that luck or other factors that are not in your control to work.

Through advice, we have the cheapest means to know what works. But it’s not all the advice that will work. When we quit advice we do it advised. A CEO of a company give up on a failing product or a line of business after reading an article in a magazine concerning that specific product two years before the discovery of a breakthrough technology that can fix the ailments of that product. The advice in that case is indirect. But its effects are immeasurable.

Know your strengths: The case of Babylon

While tracing the origins of capitalism, the city-state of Babylon became the end of the thread. George S. Clason (1874-1957) in The Richest Man in Babylon (a good book to read if you want to be part of the capitalist class before you die), agrees “Babylon became the wealthiest city of the ancient world because its citizens were the richest of their time.”

Located in the desert, the city’s engineers diverted the waters of the Euphrates into the fertile alluvial soils and built wide walls around the city. Rival kings failed against these walls until when advisors to King Nobonidus advised him to attack advancing Cyrus out of the walls in 540 BC.

A downfall came as a result of Nobonidus’ failure to stick with his strengths. But most importantly he couldn’t see when advice was wrong. You are more vulnerable when you need advice. Watch that you only take advice that is worth having.

If you are Nobonidus and I your advisor, I would start by saying, “My King, Cyrus the barbarian has been strolling in this desert for days without water and food. His horses and servants are the worst hit. I suggest, Your Highness, that we attack now. I can mention the advanced military technology our engineers gave been working on. I suggest that if we attack him outside the weapon can be of a great benefit and no other Barbarian king would dare to attack us again after defeating Cyrus. “The reason they attack us, My King, is they believe that we are weak. We have to show them that we are not.”

Advisors do not know what’s ahead. Worse, when dealing with a topic that is centered on your privacy they find themselves in the dark only to wrongly believe that they are the light. If you are to take your relationship to Reddit, explain issues in it in three paragraphs, what you get is a prediction of the future from ill-informed people. In a relationship, some issues like the one here, are easy to correct only when you understand the culture they are happening in. People on Reddit can only lead you astray.

The motive of the advisor: The guy who advised the King of Babylon had some motives. His relationship with the king might have relied on him pleasing the king. The last thing he would have wanted to do was to be seen as a useless advisor. He had to say something.

People who want to prove to you that they are useful would rather say something when they have nothing to say and those who would want to please you are all alike. Those who do not believe that you’ll make it or are scared of you going ahead of them are all alike. Do not be led astray.