Stop taking advice and do the job yourself

It's a little bit ironic to write a blog post with advice that asks you to stop taking advice, but here we go.

I advise a lot of people, especially around product management, but sometimes it feels like I am the 10th person they ask for the same advice. When I get that feeling my advice is always to stop asking me, and people like me. Dip your tows in the problem you have and see what that teaches you.

It's hard to get useful advice if the question you ask is broad and uninformed, but if you have tried a handful of things to solve your problem and failed, you can ask your advisor a lot more detailed questions resulting in a fruitful conversation for both you and the advisor. Maybe your advisor can even learn something from the experiments you have been conducting?

The same thing is true when you start a new department in a company. In Firmafon every time we had to open a new department one of us founders would lead that department for the first period. It would lead to us knowing a lot more about the topic when we had to hire the first full-time leader of the department.

So next time you are about to ask someone for advisor hire someone to fill a new role try and do something to solve the problem or do the work, see where that brings you and use that as a platform to ask more profound harder questions to advisors and candidates.