One of the best things about the internet is that you have infinite expert advice at your fingertips, often for free or cheap, and you can start learning within seconds.
One of the worst things about the internet is that infinite advice is overwhelming, often taken out of context, and with no consideration to your particular circumstances.
With so many schools of thought readily accessible on every topic, each of us has to get comfortable with a skill; how to navigate conflicting advice.

Want to gain muscle?
You’ll find 200 different approaches each claiming to be the best.

Struggling to breastfeed your newborn?
You’ll find six thousand different women telling you what worked for them.

Wondering which social media platform you should use for advertising?
You’ll hear that each of them are the way of the future and yet also a scam.

Conflicting advice can feel awful, sometimes called “cognitive whiplash”.
You feel more confused than when you started, emotionally drained and really pessimistic about your next decision.
It can discourage you from seeking out advice in the future, so everyone loses.
I don’t believe we need fewer opinions, but rather a better understanding of how to interpret opinions.
Rather than some advice being “correct” and others being “fraudulent”, perhaps they can co-exist, if we look at them in a helpful way.

The Opposite Of A Good Idea Can Also Be A Good Idea
This is the core theme of Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy, and it’s a wonderful way of seeing the world.
Two ends of a spectrum can both achieve great results, they are not mutually exclusive.
Just because your friend bought property doesn’t mean you need to do the same, when stocks, term deposits and investing in your own business have all been proven to work wonders.
TV advertising has been proven to work, so has influencer marketing and so has a pure word-of-mouth strategy.
Diversifying into new fields has been proven to work, so has concentrating your energy into one field.
We have so many success stories to learn from, and in a lot of cases two entrepreneurs succeeded through diametrically opposing strategies.
Where we run into trouble is when we hear one piece of advice and assume the opposite must be false.
Just because your cousin dropped out of university and now owns an Audi doesn’t mean you should bail on your degree.

You Don’t Need To Pick A Side
Whenever we’re learning about a new field, we often encounter different “sides” or factions who hold a collective set of beliefs.
Apple vs Android, Democrat vs Republican, Vegans vs Carnivores, Social Justice Warriors vs Bigots.
The myth here is that you need to pick a side, and can’t question parts of their system.
You can hold a tension, where you take attributes from opposing viewpoints and get the best of both worlds.
For example, you can be progressive in some areas of your work, and traditional in others.
You can advocate for some causes without the obligation to advocate for all causes.
You can borrow parts of different management styles, some transparent and some closed.
You can add more vegan meals into your week, without needing to cut all animal products in their entirety.
You can copy part of Steve Job’s mindset without also adopting his bad habits.

Understanding The Principles
There’s an important difference between a tension and a compromise.
When you understand the principles behind conflicting ideas, you can pick and choose different elements and have them work in harmony.
You don’t have to agree with everything that your preferred political party believes.
You can move to 50% remote work, and still have good quality team time.
You can have a premium label and a discounted label for the one company.
Well, you can if you understand how each of these things work.
That is, if you know which 50% of the work can be done remotely, why political parties choose their policies, and how to frame different labels for different customers.

A clumsy compromise is when you miss the underlying intent behind a particular philosophy.
·      Your vegetarian friend might also eat fish, and that doesn’t make them a hypocrite.
·      Staying in college but skipping all your lectures doesn’t make you more intelligent.
·      Buying a takeaway coffee and pouring it into your Keep Cup doesn’t help the environment.
·      Strict parenting can work, relaxed parenting can work, but inconsistency is bound to create problems.

It helps to look at the “spirit of the law” instead of just the letter of the law.
·      Your vegetarian friend might view the fishing industry differently to other forms of factory farming.
·      College only works if you absorb and practice the skills on offer.
·      Keep Cups only work if you no longer accept disposable cups or other plastics.
·      An inconsistent boundary is bound to confuse a kid more than a fixed parameter.

It’s also dangerous to assume that principles from some parts of life automatically transfer onto others.
Having a “cheat day” in your eating can be effective, cramming all your unhealthy food into one day can be better for you than spacing it out over a week.
This does not apply to something like alcohol, drinking a week’s worth on a Saturday is likely to be much worse for you that have a small amount each day.

Whatever You Do, Do It Properly
When faced with a range of advice, I can tell you the option that is least likely to work; the lukewarm approach.
This is when you try something half-heartedly for a short amount of time, and become disappointed with the lack of results.
e.g. running two lazy ads on Facebook, then declaring that Facebook ads don’t work for businesses like yours.

This is particularly relevant for forms of self-improvement:
·      Skimming books doesn’t make you well-read
·      Bad form at the gym doesn’t make you stronger
·      Outsourcing your blog posts doesn’t make you a better writer

In each of these cases, the difficult parts are what generate the improvement, so by skipping them you defeat the purpose altogether.

Seth Godin describes it beautifully:
“I followed the recipe exactly, and it failed.”
That’s how many reviews of online recipes begin.
Then the poster explains that he replaced the sour cream with yogurt (it’s what he had in the fridge), that he replaced the wheat flour with rice flour (it’s gluten-free) and he used the toaster oven instead of a real oven…
Once you are deep into a project, it’s yours.
It’s underway.
You have heart and soul and pride invested in it.
In the face of helpful advice, it’s easy to say, “sure, that’s what I’m already doing,” and then torture your description of the current project to make it sort of, almost, sound like you’re following the suggested new approach.
But you’re not.
You’re merely wasting time and effort pretending you’re embracing this new way of doing something.
What if, just for a week or even a day, you acted as if?
What if you re-did your plan, or your perceptions of the world or your approach in a totally new way, the way that respects and embraces the thing you just learned.
What if you followed the recipe by following the recipe, simply to learn the technique…
After that, after you’ve seen what it can do, then go ahead and see what happens when you re-adopt the cruft that had you looking for a new recipe in the first place.
In the age of unlimited access to recipes, the hard part about getting good advice isn’t getting it.
It’s following it.
And then you might be able to turn the recipe into insight.

Tension vs Lukewarm
These might sound like the same thing, but the difference is in the execution.
For example, a tension is choosing to take Facebook and LinkedIn seriously, foregoing Twitter, Google Ads and Instagram.
Lukewarm is creating accounts on eight different platforms and putting up half-assed posts every three weeks on each of them.

Tension is advocating for a few causes through your actions – voting with your feet and with your wallet – even when some people are bound to misunderstand why you’re doing it.
Lukewarm is posting a black tile on Instagram or a rainbow flag logo, then remaining oblivious to your prejudiced hiring and promotion systems.

Tensions get results, while lukewarm changes fizzle out.
If you are an all-or-nothing person, it might be better to start with any school of thought and invest entirely.
It might not be “optimal” but you’ll at least see results, and you can learn over time how to create a more nuanced tension.

Advice Assumes Sacrifice
Almost every new improvement requires a sacrifice of some description:
·      Upfront costs
·      Ongoing costs
·      Managing uncertainty
·      Reduced leisure time
·      Deadlines
·      Risk of embarrassment
·      Reduced flexibility and choices

Whenever you hear someone giving advice, they will likely tell you about their results but not necessarily mention their sacrifices.
What the advice-giver is willing to sacrifice might be different to what you’re willing to sacrifice, so the cost of their proposed changes will feel much higher.

For example, I give a lot of advice that involves the need to think more, to do proper measurements, to invest time and money in good tools, to forego novel opportunities in order to do two or three things to a high standard.
If those aren’t things you’re willing to do, then my advice won’t be for you.

Design A Fair Test
I’m a big believer in testing new ideas and gut feelings – a good idea will withstand a fair test.
Whenever you are entertaining pieces of conflicting advice, can you create a simple, cheap test that will reveal the truth?
For example, can you rent a piece of equipment for two weeks before deciding whether you want to buy it outright?
Can you do a 30 day free trial of a platform to see if you’re still using it on Day 29?
Can you pre-sell a new product before committing to investing in the first batch?

This also applies to taking advice from people who haven’t tried something for themselves.
There’s a good reason why I don’t write about a lot of business topics, I’ve never experienced them first-hand, so when these come up I keep my mouth shut and refer my clients to people with genuine insights.
If someone hasn’t run a Google Ad, don’t put too much weight into their opinion on Google Ads – they haven’t run a fair test yet.

 
They say “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain an idea without accepting it”, and that’s our job when it comes to conflicting advice.
These are all facets of entertaining an idea, examining the concept and the advice giver without emotion or impatience.
If you’re willing to hold a tension, to see the hidden sacrifices and run a fair test for yourself, you’ll end up with some valuable improvements in your life and your business.
And when you’re giving advice that might go against what someone has previously heard, why not tell them about the sacrifices you’ve happily made and help them design a fair test of their own?