Thinking About Advice

Tressie McMillan Cottom’s latest New York Times column -- I get a kick out of writing that -- has been rattling around in my head for a few days. It’s about unsolicited advice. As she puts it, “Advice is a method by which we manipulate status to negotiate interpersonal interactions. By giving advice, we enact tiny theaters of social dominance to signal or procure our social status over others.”

Ouch. As someone who wrote a how-to about community college administration and periodically runs columns with the title “Ask the Administrator,” this one cuts close to home. In offering insights into why administrators sometimes make the decisions they do, am I repeatedly enacting tiny theaters of social dominance? That doesn’t sound good.

That said, hoarding information and letting false assumptions go unchallenged doesn’t seem terribly helpful, either.

I’ve received plenty of advice over the years, both personal and professional. Much of it was either irrelevant or misplaced. But some of it was actually helpful. I’ve been trying to isolate what separated the best advice from the rest.

In a word, the best advice was empowering. It fit my situation closely enough to be relevant, and it offered a way to make things better. My favorite example came from a roommate in grad school to whom I had been expressing angst around my dissertation. He asked how many chapters I had written. I said five. He asked how many chapters it needed. I smiled and said five. He said, “Turn it in and make them tell you what’s wrong with it.”

He was right. It isn’t a brilliant dissertation, but it’s a finished one. That enabled me to move on.

A few years later, when I applied for my first administrative job, the dean who hired me referred to my application as a “career move.” I really hadn’t thought of it that way, but when I read that, I realized he was right. That got me thinking much more intentionally about a possible pathway, as opposed to the next year or two.

In both of those cases, my interlocutors helped me see around a corner. Neither asked me to act like a different person or to try to do what they had done. Both were consistent with goals I had set for myself; in some ways, they both amounted to helping me get out of my own way.

There has been no shortage of terrible advice, of course. Some falls into the “back in my day” category. That’s the advice that may once have been valid, but the world in which that would have been true no longer exists. (“You can always fall back on teaching!”) A closely related version is the “if you were a different person, this could work” advice. Young people can be more susceptible to that, given that self-awareness sometimes takes time to develop. At this point, I’m much clearer on who I am, and who I’m not, than I was at, say, 22. It’s easier to connect the dots when you’ve accumulated more dots. And of course, some comes from people with other agendas who are trying to engineer outcomes for their own benefit, or according to their own ideas of how the world should work. In those cases, the recipient is reduced to the object of the sentence. That’s toxic.

At least with writing -- whether books, blogs or articles -- the “unsolicited” piece of unsolicited advice is somewhat attenuated. We can choose what we read. Depending on the day, I think of my posts as either newspaper columns or messages in bottles cast out to sea. People who don’t want to read them don’t have to. Even the “Ask the Administrator” pieces are responses to people who asked. I post them on the assumption that some others may see value in them, too. Some do, some don’t. The point is to empower people to make sense of an unusual industry so they can make better decisions for themselves and, ideally, help improve the way the industry works. Heaven knows there are enough industry myths and zombie ideas out there to prevent progress; if public thinking can help cut through some of that, it probably should.

A hundred years ago, John Dewey wrote of “organized intelligence” as our best hope for solving social problems. In its best moments, I see the internet as instantiating organized intelligence. (Unfortunately, that’s only a subset of what it instantiates …) Thoughtful pushback on incomplete thoughts can help improve them. That’s not just idealism; the original purpose of ARPANET was to help researchers share information. That function is in the internet’s DNA. Cat videos came later.

Still, it’s hard to deny McMillan Cottom’s observation. Lurking underneath an explanation is an assumption that one person understands something the other doesn’t. That can easily become an exercise in status or even exploitation. There’s a reason I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it over the last several days.