If you are ambitious in your goals for work and want to continue improving your performance, then you’re going to get a lot of advice from people. If you try to follow all the advice you get, you’ll be a like a dog chasing its tail. There will be a lot of activity, but you’ll get no closer to the success you crave.
That doesn’t mean you should ignore all the advice you’re given either. Instead, you have to figure out which advice you should heed and which you should ignore. Here are three things to consider.
1. Find the good teachers
It is natural to go to people who have the success you’d like to achieve and get their advice about how to be successful. While that seems like an obvious thing to do, it may not be the best way to get helpful advice.
For one thing, most people have a hard time separating the things they themselves have done from the other factors that drove their success. Every great success story involves a significant degree of luck on top of the effort, preparation, and creativity that contributed to a great outcome. As a result, the advice you get from a successful person may overemphasize factors that may not work for you.
Instead, you want to find people who are good teachers. Good teachers have thought about what factors are under your control that you should pursue to reach your goals. They are adept at understanding what you are currently doing. They’re also able to give you clear recommendations on how to change what you’re doing now in the most effective ways. They’re able to explain what you should be looking for in other people, and the world, to signal what actions you should take.
Great teachers may or may not be the people who have achieved the success you strive for. But if you find someone with a knack for teaching, take their advice when they give it.
2. Find those who care the right amount
For someone to give you advice, they have to care about you to some degree. The best advice is likely to come from people who care about you and your success—but not too much.
People who don’t care much about you at all may give advice, particularly if you ask for it. But they’re are unlikely to invest enough effort to know the details of your life so as to tell whether the advice they are giving you is useful. At the other extreme, people who care too much about you may be so invested in your success that they are prone to micromanage. A parent, close relative, or loved one may give advice more to reduce their own anxiety about your future than to help you choose the right path for yourself.
The best advice comes from people who are in between. They care enough to invest in the details of your life, so that they know what you’re trying to achieve and how you have gone about it. But, they are not so strongly invested in your future that they allow their own goals to overshadow yours.
3. Know people’s angles
The idea that people close to you may be more focused on reducing their anxiety than in pushing your success is a specific instance of the more general case that everyone has an angle, and their goals are likely to affect the advice they give you.
Chances are you receive a certain number of unsolicited messages in your email or LinkedIn inbox from people advising you on how to do your work. These emails generally reflect a business someone is trying to promote. And you are naturally skeptical of these notes.
But, when you get advice from someone, you may not be as vigilant about understanding the goals of the advice-giver. Ideally, you’ll find people whose personal goals are aligned with your own. A supervisor at work who hopes to promote you into a management position you also desire may be likely to give good advice. In contrast, a supervisor who sees you as a potential threat might be someone whose advice is worth reflecting on before taking.
Give it time to work
When you do choose to take advice from someone, you are probably motivated to make a change. As a result, you will have heightened sensitivity to any information that relates to the change you’re making.
Any time you try to do something differently, you have to break some old habits. You also need to figure out whether the changes you are making will lead to some success. That generally takes time. If you keep chasing advice, you may not stick with a new routine long enough to know whether it is having a positive impact. Decide on a change you want to make, and then give it a shot. Pay attention to feedback you’re getting as a result of the actions you take, but don’t keep tweaking your approach until you have some sense of what is working.