Comments on: Advice On The Fly

By: Ian M Rountree

Ian M Rountree — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:28:46 +0000

Glad you liked it!

By: Amanya Jacobs

Amanya Jacobs — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:19:26 +0000

What a creative and unusual approach to advice! I love the perspective that advice is mostly offered from a place of “perceived benefit”. So, whether you act on it or store it for the future, you’re recognizing it’s value. Interesting…

By: New Post at Thoughtwrestling. | Ian M Rountree

New Post at Thoughtwrestling. | Ian M Rountree — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:08:45 +0000

[...] Advice on the Fly. [...]

By: Ian M Rountree

Ian M Rountree — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:05:41 +0000

That’s a part of it – some advice may be in the wrong context “at the moment” or may become useless out of the moment’s situation. It’s the drop-off in offering it anyway, even knowing (and sometime saying that it’s ok) it may be rejected.

By: Rebecca Leaman

Rebecca Leaman — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:44:01 +0000

Ditto, re “the bit about child-proofing the world instead of world-proofing the child”)…
Seems like we’ve come to a place where we want to know the “ROI” before we take any action, and where the value of “casual wisdom” (as I like to call it) must be proven six ways from Sunday before we are willing to look for value in it. Risk adversion? But risk is the only route to discovery.

By: Bill Wren

Bill Wren — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:39:07 +0000

I don’t keep track of everything, but I do track a lot of it. I’m terrible, however, at doing it in an organized way. When I do attempt it, often using some available tool, I tend to eventually neglect it. That is more personal flaw than anything else. Currently, though, I am using Google docs to track some items.

I’m glad you pointed out the importance of context and perspective on “advice.” And Mark’s points about why some people don’t give it are bang on. If there is a problem with advice it’s in that context/perspective area. When something doesn’t work, many of us blame some advice we’ve received — a kind of blame deflecting response.

By: Scott Marshall

Scott Marshall — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:12:02 +0000

Nice piece, I especially like the bit about child-proofing the world instead of world-proofing the child. As for keeping track of stuff, I have long been the type to write down ideas on scraps of paper and find them later or put them in a physical folder relevant to whatever project they might be pertinent to. This particularly happens with fiction writing or comics work. For more business-oriented stuff I am a big fan of 37Signals' Highrise, a CRM application that allows you to create a list of contacts, make notes about them, to-do lists and so on. My typical day involves checking my Highrise to-do list either on the computer or my iPhone and seeing what I should try to have done today, tomorrow, this week, etc.

By: Ian M Rountree

Ian M Rountree — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 13:00:04 +0000

I’d agree with all your reasons, Mark – and with the question about retrieval.

I keep copious amounts of notes as a general problem solving tool. My memory is shaky at the best of times, so having paper (or, in most cases notes on my BlackBerry or through Evernote) helps me collate at least a few days’ worth of information at a time. A lot of this becomes blog posts – actually, it’s one of the reasons I started blogging, to create a searchable record.

By: Mark Dykeman

Mark Dykeman — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 11:50:41 +0000

Ian, how do you track these different bits of information? Keywords? Separate documents? Folders? I think that retrieval would be a key requirement.

In my opinion, the main reasons why some people don’t give advice on the fly are:

- They don’t want to look stupid.
- They don’t want to make things worse.
- They don’t want to be sued.
- They don’t want to do it for free.