Thursday morning, December 4th. Watching someone ask for book recommendations on "how to start a business" instead of just starting the business. The advice-seeking is the procrastination.

The Advice Economy

Here's the modern script:

Learn from others. Don't reinvent the wheel. Seek wisdom. Read books. Listen to podcasts. Take courses. Model success. Find mentors. Study what worked. Get advice before you start. Be smart about this.

The promise: If you learn from enough successful people, you'll avoid their mistakes and replicate their success. Advice is efficiency. Why fumble in the dark when someone has already found the light switch?

The reality: Most advice either tells you things you already know ("work hard," "be consistent"), doesn't apply to your specific situation, or requires context you don't have. And crucially: seeking advice has become an excuse to avoid starting.

Thesis: Advice-seeking has become a socially acceptable form of procrastination. We collect frameworks, principles, and wisdom as a substitute for action. The advice economy promises efficiency but mostly delivers delay. Most valuable knowledge can't be transmitted through advice—it has to be earned through experience. The advice trap isn't that we receive bad guidance; it's that we've learned to mistake learning about something for doing it. Stop asking, start trying.

What's Actually Happening

Let's examine the advice trap's mechanisms:

Advice Is Context-Dependent

The advice that worked for someone else came with context you don't have:

Example: "I succeeded by working 80-hour weeks early in my career."

  • Their context: Single, no kids, living with parents, high energy, specific industry timing, particular skill set, certain risk tolerance, specific opportunity landscape
  • Your context: Different family situation, different energy levels, different skills, different timing, different opportunities

The advice seems transferable but isn't. What worked for them in their context might fail or harm you in yours.

More examples:

  • "Quit your job and pursue your passion" (works with a financial cushion, fails without one)
  • "Just ship it and iterate" (works in some markets, catastrophic in others)
  • "Say no to everything that isn't your priority" (works with social capital, fails when you're building it)

Successful people give advice based on what they did. But they can't transmit the context that made those actions work. You hear "work hard," not "work hard while living rent-free with supportive parents in a booming industry."

Most Advice Is Obvious

Look at the actual content of popular advice:

  • Work consistently
  • Focus on what matters
  • Learn from failures
  • Take care of your health
  • Build good relationships
  • Start before you're ready
  • Don't give up too soon

None of this is secret knowledge. You already know these things. Reading them again doesn't help. The problem was never ignorance—it was execution.

The advice industry repackages obvious wisdom:

  • Different frameworks for the same ideas
  • New jargon for old concepts
  • Personal stories wrapped around basic principles
  • Specific tactics for general truths

You don't need more insights. You need to actually do the obvious things. "Start before you're ready" is great advice. You've probably heard it fifty times. When are you starting?

Advice-Seeking Becomes the Work

Here's the trap's most insidious mechanism:

Seeking advice feels productive. You're being smart. Strategic. Learning from others. Not stumbling blindly. This is responsible preparation.

But it's actually avoidance. You're not preparing to do the work—you're substituting research for action.

Watch this pattern:

  • Want to start a business → Read three books on entrepreneurship
  • Want to write → Take a course on writing
  • Want to get fit → Research optimal workout programs
  • Want to learn to code → Watch tutorials about learning to code

The learning becomes the thing you do instead of the thing. You feel productive (you're learning!) while avoiding the actual work (starting, writing, exercising, coding).

The person who starts the business with no books learns faster than the person who reads fifty books and never starts. Action teaches. Advice delays.

Why We Love Advice

If advice is so problematic, why do we consume so much of it?

It Provides Certainty Theater

Starting is scary because you don't know what will happen. Advice promises to reduce uncertainty. Study enough, and you'll know the right path.

This is comforting but false. You can't learn to swim by reading about swimming. You can't learn to handle rejection by reading about handling rejection. You can't learn to manage a team by reading about management.

The knowledge you need comes from doing, not from advice. But doing is scary and advice feels safe.

Advice provides certainty theater: the illusion of preparation without the risk of actual action.

It's Social Capital Without Risk

Giving advice is high-status. You're the expert. The successful one. The person with answers. Everyone defers to you.

Receiving advice is also high-status. You're thoughtful. Strategic. Connected enough to access wisdom.

Both sides get social rewards without actual risk:

  • The advice-giver looks wise without being accountable for outcomes
  • The advice-seeker looks thoughtful without having to act

Compare to actually doing things:

  • High risk of failure
  • Public evidence of struggles
  • No guaranteed validation

Advice culture lets us play status games while avoiding real work.

We Conflate Information with Understanding

Modern education trained us to believe knowledge comes from transmission. Teacher talks, you listen, you learn. Read the book, understand the concept, pass the test.

This works for factual knowledge. Capital of France: Paris. Speed of light: 299,792,458 m/s. These can be transmitted.

It fails for experiential knowledge. How to handle a difficult conversation. When to pivot your strategy. How to manage your energy. These must be earned.

But we apply the transmission model to everything. Want to learn something? Find someone who knows it and have them explain. This works for facts, fails for skills and wisdom.

You can't download experience. Yet we keep trying.

What Actually Works

If most advice is useless or harmful, what should you do instead?

Start Before You're Ready

The most valuable advice is also the most ignored: start now.

Not after you've:

  • Read all the books
  • Taken the courses
  • Found a mentor
  • Made a perfect plan
  • Eliminated uncertainty

Now. With what you have. Knowing less than you wish you did.

Why this works:

  • Real problems teach faster than hypothetical ones
  • You learn what advice you actually need (specific, not general)
  • Experience builds judgment that can't be transmitted
  • Starting reveals what you don't know (which is different from what you think you don't know)

Example: Want to start a consulting business?

  • Don't read books on consulting
  • Don't take courses on business formation
  • Don't research ideal pricing models

Just: Call someone who might need your expertise and offer to help them solve a problem.

You'll encounter real problems immediately. How to price. How to structure the work. How to communicate value. These are the problems worth solving. Books about hypothetical businesses don't help with your actual business.

Seek Specific Advice for Real Problems

Useful advice is specific, tactical, and requested after you've tried something.

Bad: "How do I start a podcast?" Good: "I've recorded three episodes but they sound muddy. I'm using [specific mic] in [specific room]. What should I try?"

Bad: "How do I get better at writing?" Good: "This paragraph feels clunky but I can't see why. What's wrong with it?"

The pattern:

  1. Try something
  2. Encounter a specific problem
  3. Troubleshoot yourself first
  4. Ask for specific help if still stuck

This works because:

  • You have context to evaluate the advice
  • You can test it immediately
  • The advice is actionable, not theoretical
  • You're learning to solve problems, not collecting wisdom

Trust Experience Over Advice

When advice contradicts your direct experience, trust experience.

Everyone says: "Morning routines are crucial for productivity." Your experience: You're a night person and do your best work at 11pm.

Trust your experience. The advice came from someone else's context. Your experience is your context.

This doesn't mean ignore all advice. It means: advice is a hypothesis to test, not truth to adopt. Try it, see if it works for you, keep or discard based on results.

Your direct feedback loop beats everyone else's indirect advice.

Build a Practice, Not a Knowledge Base

Stop trying to learn everything before starting. Start, and build a practice.

A practice is:

  • Regular action
  • Attention to feedback
  • Incremental improvement
  • Tolerance for sucking at first

A practice teaches you:

  • What actually matters (different from what experts say matters)
  • What works for you (different from what works for them)
  • What problems are real (different from what problems seem real)
  • What to learn next (different from what curricula suggest)

Example: Learning to code

  • Don't: Take six courses, read three books, watch tutorials
  • Do: Pick a small project, start building, get stuck, learn what you need to get unstuck, repeat

The practice generates the curriculum. Far more efficiently than any pre-made curriculum could.

The Meta-Advice Problem

Here's the awkward part: this essay is advice.

I'm telling you advice is overrated while giving you advice. This is either hypocrisy or recursion.

Here's the difference I hope exists:

Most advice says: "Here's what worked for me, you should do it too."

This essay says: "Stop collecting advice and start acting. Your experience will teach you faster than my words."

One asks you to adopt my framework. The other asks you to build your own through action.

But honestly? If you finish this essay and think "great point, I should read more about taking action before reading more advice," you've proven the point. The advice trap got you again.

The only way this advice works is if you close this tab and start something you've been postponing.

Takeaways

What to stop:

  • Seeking advice as preparation before starting
  • Collecting frameworks and wisdom as a substitute for action
  • Trusting general advice from people with different contexts
  • Waiting until you know enough to begin

What to start:

  • Begin before you feel ready
  • Let problems emerge from doing, then solve them
  • Seek specific advice for specific problems you've already encountered
  • Trust your direct experience over other people's indirect wisdom
  • Build a practice, not a knowledge base

The harsh truth: Most of the advice you've consumed hasn't helped you. Not because it was wrong, but because it's not the bottleneck. You don't need more insights. You need to act on the obvious ones you already have.

The uncomfortable truth: This includes the advice in this essay. If it doesn't prompt you to close this and start something, it's just more content you've consumed.

Stop learning about the thing. Start doing the thing. The best teacher is the work itself.

Today's Sketch

December 04, 2025