Why you don’t need more advice…
Perspective Note #01
Why You Don’t Need More Advice
Have you ever received a piece of advice that actually helped you?
If you’re like most of us, you’d probably answer yes.
Advice can be incredibly useful when we know how to question it, put it into perspective, and decide what actually applies to us.
And yet, we live in a world where we’ve never had so much access to advice, answers, methods and ready-made solutions. Technology has given us unprecedented access to information. We are constantly exposed to opinions, recipes for success, happiness or fulfilment, content telling us what we should do, and testimonials showing that THIS worked for THEM.
“It worked for X people. You just have to stick to it.”
With AI, answers have become even more accessible. We can ask almost any question and receive a personalised, articulate response within seconds.
We have never had so many answers, so readily available.
And somehow, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting better at knowing what’s right for us.
Because accumulating information, success stories and externally sourced answers is not the same as developing an internal response, one that is considered and aligned with who you are, what matters to you and the life you actually live.
It can be easy to spend more time absorbing what the world has to say than deliberately examining what we think, what we want, what matters to us and why.
Often, the problem isn’t that we don’t know our options. We know them perfectly well.
The harder question is what we actually want to do with them.
Do we even want any of them?
Before asking “Which one should I choose?”, perhaps there is another question worth asking:
“Do I care enough about any of these options to choose one at all?”
And perhaps that is part of the problem. The options we spend so much time evaluating are often shaped by ideas of what we should want in the first place.
What makes a good career. A good life. A good decision.
Ready-made answers are built around someone else’s life. The more advice we absorb, the more we risk trying to make our own situation fit answers that were built around someone else’s reality. Or everyone else’s.
But your life is not generic. It’s not a piece of code you can fix by applying the right formula.
What works for your friend, your parent or your colleague isn’t necessarily what’s right for you. A method might be excellent and still not fit your context, your priorities, your constraints, your aspirations or what gives you a sense of purpose.
Even AI, for all its ability to personalise a conversation, works with the situation as we present it: what we tell it, what we leave out and the assumptions contained in the way we frame our questions.
And however much context we provide, there remains a fundamental difference between knowing information about a life and actually experiencing it.
No AI knows what it is to live your life.
No AI experiences your relationships, your ambitions, your contradictions, your fears or the weight you give to each of them.
Sometimes, then, what we need isn’t another answer.
It’s space to think.
Time to follow a thought without immediately interrupting it with more information, another opinion or another search for an answer. Time to ask ourselves not only “What should I do?” but also “What do I think? What do I want? What matters to me? Why?”
Time for deeper reflection.
But thinking for ourselves doesn’t necessarily mean thinking alone.
Reflecting on our own can be extremely powerful. It can also eventually bring us up against the limits of our own thinking: our biases, our blind spots, our patterns, the assumptions we don’t realise we’re making, even the options that spontaneously come to mind.
We can’t always see what sits outside our own frame of reference from inside it.
This can contribute to us making the same kinds of decisions repeatedly. Or even to making decisions that aren’t objectively bad, but that we still end up regretting because they weren’t the result of a deliberate thinking process we can look back on and stand behind.
Sometimes, what we lack are challenging thoughts. People, or even ideas, that question the status quo, challenge our assumptions and do so with care.
Sometimes, we need our thinking to be confronted with a different perspective.
Not someone who replaces our thinking with theirs. Someone who helps us step outside our own frame long enough to see what we couldn’t see from inside it.
A different perspective doesn’t give you the answer. It changes what you’re able to see.
A conversation can question an assumption, reframe a situation, bring a contradiction to the surface or invite us to explore a possibility we might have dismissed too quickly.
But the purpose is not to hand our judgement over to someone else.
It is to understand our own thinking more clearly.
Clarity might mean making a decision. But it can also mean recognising what we don’t want, understanding ourselves differently, seeing a situation from a new angle, identifying what needs to change, or simply knowing what we want to explore next.
We might reach a point where we can say:
I understand what I think.
I understand what matters to me.
I understand why.
The answer remains yours.
And clarity can lead to transformation.
Sometimes that transformation is significant: changing direction, making a decision we had been postponing, leaving something behind or starting something new.
Sometimes it is much smaller: a boundary we finally set, a conversation we decide to have, a habit we question, a different way of looking at something we thought we understood.
And sometimes, transformation begins before anything changes on the outside. We simply understand ourselves, our situation or what matters to us differently.
Reflection gives us space to think.
Perspective changes what we can see.
Clarity helps us understand what matters.
Transformation is what we choose to do with it.
This is why I don’t believe we always need more advice.
Sometimes, we need the space to think deeply enough to find our own way forward.
In a world full of advice, make room for reflection.
Sarah SER | Clarity & Perspective
