Advice Gets Good When It Gets Specific
I’ve never had great penmanship, but one day in grade four it went from atrocious to merely eccentric after receiving a single piece of advice from my father.
I had already received frequent advice on the matter from my teachers. Pay attention to what you’re doing. Don’t get frustrated, just make each one a little better. Practice, practice, practice.
My dad’s advice was much more specific: try to make the bottom of each letter touch the blue line.
This made for an immediate improvement, because it made it clear what to do differently—get the loop of the “b” and the trunk of the “t” to meet the cyan lines, rather than float somewhere above them.
The advice of my teachers was still valid, despite being all clichés. You probably can get good at almost anything by doing it repeatedly and paying close attention, while trying to improve on each repetition. That’s probably how Larry Bird got good at basketball.
In fact, some of the best advice comes in the form of clichés. Be yourself. Seize the day. Fake it till you make it. Despite how trite these phrases sound now, they are still deep, paradigm-shifting insights about being human. They’ve undoubtedly changed countless lives, which is how they became trite. Precisely because these principles have been discovered and expressed many times, in many contexts, they’ve become too general and too familiar to revolutionize how someone does something.
In my experience, breakthroughs happen when the advice gets specific. “Seize the day” is good advice, in the sense that it contains a powerful truth about living well. But it’s not nearly as useful as, “Do something that intimidates you before noon,” or “Never put something off a third time, if you plan to ever do it.”
“Live in the present” might be the most profound advice of all time, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how to do it, or even what it really can mean. On this blog I’ve tried to offer forms of this advice that are specific enough to use:
When you start taking these more specific actions, the power of present-focused living starts to reveal itself. When these revelations happen to you, they feel fresh and concrete—the opposite of what you’d expect from an abstract, familiar phrase like “Live in the present.”
Notice that these more specific expressions of classic life advice all refer to concrete objects and things. They identify a real-life moment where the wisdom would make a difference, and they tell you how to create that difference.
Without a specific application point, a piece of classic wisdom is just a platitude. It lives in your world only as a concept, like an unread classic book. You may love the title—East of Eden, say—and what it sounds like it’s about. You display it on your shelf, and you might feel a vague affection for it, but you don’t know who Adam Trask is, or what the word ‘Timshel’ means. The book’s presence may be comforting, but it doesn’t change you.
To use advice, you need instructions specific enough to change how actual moments of your life go. For example, “Just do it” sounds like a potent personal mantra. All of those impressive Olympic athletes probably “just do it” all the time. But when and where do you “just do it” exactly? Well, you might learn to throw your legs over the bed and onto the floor the moment your alarm clock goes off. Or maybe you know to grasp the dumbbell handle as soon as you notice yourself thinking about skipping the next set. The advice has no value until it is parsed into specific know-how that applies in certain kinds of moments. Once it is, it begins to transform the person.
This principle extends to clichéd advice particular to certain activities. In chess, the classic beginner advice is “Develop your pieces,” which means to get all your pieces to better squares than the ones they start on. I had this phrase in my mind for years, but it didn’t really improve my chess games until someone gave me a more specific version:
Put a pawn in the center and protect it. Bring out knights, then bishops, then the queen, to squares where they are active but protected. Castle your king, then get at least one rook to the center of the back rank.
This advice is still pretty general, but it’s much more useful, because it gets down to the level on which the doing actually occurs—pieces on squares—just like my dad’s “touch the blue line” advice got my pencil to go where it needed to go.
Clichés seem like they have nothing left to give us, but they often represent some truly life-altering wisdom, which hasn’t yet become real for you. The problem is that the wisdom is locked up in generality until you make it more specific and concrete.
It might seem like you need some wiser person to tell you what the specific advice is, but not really. Say the idea of carpe diem resonates with you. You can ask yourself, “How would I ‘seize the day’ on this sleepy Tuesday afternoon in my office?” and a more specific principle might occur to you:
- Attempt difficult tasks at times when you want to do easy ones.
- Start dialing the phone before you feel fully ready to talk.
- Imagine going home having done task A, and also having not done it, then decide which version of the future is more appealing.
These are just possible moves to make, possible ways to seize the day before you_,_ derived from combining your abundant life experience with the situation at hand. If you try these moves and they work, you will probably remember them and do them again, and the dusty old phrase “seize the day” will have gained some real meaning and power, for you anyway.
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Need help getting stuff done?
I wrote a little book for people like you and me, called How to Do Things: Productivity for the Productivity-Challenged. You can read it in one sitting and be getting more done by the time the sun sets.
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Photo by Nicolò Canu
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