The Problem with “Good” Advice
Since I started working full time, I've wanted to start a business of my own. The challenge for me has always been figuring out just what that business would be.
A few weeks ago, Whitney and I sat down for a conversation with Jen Moss, and in it, we talked about the business that she started with her husband Jim Moss a number of years ago. It was a technology company called Plasticity Labs. The company offered a software platform for companies to better understand employee happiness as a way to improve engagement and ultimately workplace culture.
This concept was born as a technology platform, in large part because of the advice they were given. At the time, many of their mentors were from technology hubs (San Francisco and Waterloo Region), so the guidance was to build a technology platform that could be sold to companies at high profit margins.
The concept itself, improving employee health and happiness, was a good one. But the form it took was not, at least not for Jen and Jim and not at that time. Where they really wanted to focus was in advancing research on this topic. Had they leaned into where their energy was drawing them, by Jen's account, their work could have been far advanced from where it is today.
Now, to be clear, Jim and Jen are badass, and the impact their work is having today is immense. Jim's work as The Smile CEO is having a transformational impact on our region, and Jen has written three best-selling books and travels the world advising whole nations on their plans for building happiness into their economic strategies.
But the point is that years were spent going down one path before they got onto the one they both feel they were always meant to be on. Although well intentioned, advice from others sometimes doesn't help. It holds us back.
I've shared before my experience growing up and “checking the boxes” of life, moving from one thing to the next, but finding myself feeling like there was still something missing.
Looking back, I recall many times feeling surges of inspiration. It would happen when I'd mentor companies and get excited to join one of those. Or I'd serve as a Board member for a non-profit organization and see an opportunity to step in and drive a big initiative forward.
But after that initial surge of excitement, I'd talk myself out of it and return to “business as usual.” This feeling of getting excited and then “returning to Earth” (as I'd call it) became such a routine for me that I came to expect it. When I started to feel that energy surge, I started to anticipate that it would only be a matter of time before it would wear off. So instead of taking action, I'd dismiss it and convince myself to just stay focused on whatever I was doing at the time.
But then, there was cheese. There is a longer story here that I'll share eventually, but for now, here's the summary.
A number of years ago, in an effort to reignite the passion that I'd lost professionally, I began working at a cheese stand at our local farmer's market on Saturday mornings (as one does). When I began, I knew nothing about the unlabelled items in our counter, but within weeks, I'd studied and tasted them all, and had a story for almost every one of them. The energy of the experience pulled me in and I went with it.
As I poured more energy into the cheese, it continued to pour more energy back into me. Before long, I began meeting local cheese-makers and distributors and discovered a problem they all shared. I became convinced that I could help to solve it. I was sure I'd found an entrepreneurial path that I had a passion to pursue.
I researched, began drafting a business plan, and reached out to an entrepreneur I knew in the food industry who continued to fuel my fire. He redlined my plan, sending it back, telling me where it wasn't right, and giving suggestions on where I could make it better.
I was on fire, excited, nervous, and ultimately thrilled to be on a path to creating something that I knew could be helpful and that I cared about. This time, I wasn't going to talk myself out of it.
But then, I made the mistake that many of us make. I set a meeting with a family member to share my plans with him. From across his desk, he looked at me and told me it wouldn't work.
He asked me if I'd considered how much cheese I'd have to sell to make $100K? $200K?
I hadn't.
He asked me if I'd considered how my lifestyle would need to change in order to make a leap like this?
I thought I had, but until he asked me like that, I guess I hadn't really.
He asked me if I had any perspective on how much established players in the industry had already invested in making this work, and how I was going to compete with that?
Nope. Hadn't quantified that either.
He suggested that the professional path I was already on was a good one. That staying where I was would give me a great way to build a career and reputation and provide for my family, which was just getting started. He thought that the time for cheese might come later, once I was more established, perhaps.
In his defence, he was giving advice that he really thought was in my best interest. As a successful entrepreneur himself, he had made those sacrifices and faced those same challenges. When he looked at me, he didn't want me to have to suffer in ways that he had.
Whatever his intentions were, the result was the fire for this idea immediately being snuffed out. I felt stupid for even trying, and for putting so much energy into something that clearly wasn't going anywhere.
So I left it. And from that point forward, I put my head down and focused on doing my best work in the career I had at that time.
Unlike Jim and Jen, I was discouraged from trying to start down a path that I felt energized by and passionate about. But like Jim and Jen, I was given advice that ultimately wasn't right for me, and I listened to it. In both cases the advice was well intentioned and given from positions of experience, but it kept both of us from being further along in our adventures if we'd just had the courage to follow our own intuition.
Situations like these are not uncommon. I'm sure you can think of times when you've considered making a change in your life, and thought better of it after getting advice from a family member or friend. This advice often comes from a place of caring, but the result is countless ideas and passions never pursued.
All of this is what made our most recent podcast conversation even more inspiring, because it was with someone who had all kinds of reasons not to pursue an idea, but he did it anyway.
A few weeks ago, we sat down with Glenn Pascoe, the creator of an organization called One4Another. They provide emergency medical care to children in Uganda. As a trained social worker, the question he was often asked in the early days was how he could start, let alone run, an organization that offers medical care to youth without a medical degree himself.
It wasn't easy at first, but he didn't let it stop him. He found the right advice to listen to and went for it.
Now, 12 years later, his organization has built a hospital to support the care and recovery of patients (children) and their families, and over 3,500 lives and families have been transformed by the work his organization does.
What if he had listened to his critics? What if he had done what I did, had given up and left the idea behind?
It's a damn good thing he didn't listen.
One of my favourite books is The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, and this idea of good and bad advice reminded me of one of my favourite quotes from it:
"If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own."
OK, OK! BREAK IT DOWN, BOYD!
We're all quite good at talking ourselves out of ideas that could improve and perhaps transform our own lives, and even potentially improve and transform communities and the world. And then, if we're able to quiet our own inner critic, we often face a bigger challenge in overcoming the voices of others who care about us, but give advice that can hold us back.
While advice from others can often be helpful, sometimes it can get in the way of achieving our dreams.
To sort this out, here are some questions I've found useful to consider whenever I'm seeking (or getting) feedback from others. This has become a good filter for me to know when advice is something I should listen to, or something that I should be cautious of:
How is this person invested in the current version of who I am?
How might me taking action change who I am?
How might me taking action change my relationship with the person who's giving the advice?
Advice has its place, but only you can know what makes you come alive. There is a practice to learning to tell the difference between advice that sharpens your path and advice that will hold you back.
And then, once you've figured that out, it is on you to have the courage to take action and bring your idea to life.
We hope you do, because the world needs your ideas, dreams and passions. Now more than ever.