Using knowledge that has made others successful
Ilse and I went through a stack of old Fortune magazines and came up with one on giving advice. What is the role of good advice anyway? How can you take what someone has found useful and tape it onto how you would function? Is it useless and if it is useful how does taking advice work.
Between pages 39 and 50 of the July 6 2009 of Fortune magazine we found what some rich and famous thought were some answers to what can make you successful in life. After a couple of title pages and pictures we read about and interview in which Bill Gates and his father comment on parenting, being the son who was parented. Highlights include encouraging a young Bill Gates to do things he was not good at including in sports where he was shy of gifts and skills. The Gates parents described a loving supportive relationship that was managed mostly by instincts. Later Bill Gates took lots of advice from another mentor, Warren Buffett, which suggested that his parents helped him appreciate being mentored. Lloyd Blankfein (the famous or infamous CEO of Goldman Sacks) also emphasized listening to others, listening to their advice, but then added that it was important to keep cool and effective under stress (but left out an important ingredient, how should you learn to do that). Mort Zuckerman (editor of U.S. News and World Reports) provides this advice for success, ‘Do what you love” (but again something is missing if you want to make use of that suggestion). The CEO of Costco advises that you ‘show rather than tell ‘which makes sense but then in the same article Tory Burch CEO of Tory Burch tells you to trust your instincts and we are not sure what that means but we pass it on as possible good advice. Mika Brezezinski of MSNBC thinks you should use failure to motivate yourself (but doesn’t that mean you have to not feel like a failure?) and I guess thinking of yourself as pretty ok is behind the advice given by the sports agent Scott Boras who advises that you strive to be effective rather than popular. Colin Powell’s advice is stick to the task rather than thinking about what it means for you personally advising that you should focus on performance rather than on power (your own). I will end all of this advice giving by pointing out that Tiger Woods advises that we keep it simple.
The problem with all of this is that taking advice that is useful assumes that you have loads of expertise in the same area as that of the advice giver. To know what they are talking about, even when the words seem simple enough, requires in-depth experiences that are relevant to the advice being given. The highly successful are experts at success and that expertise is not easily passed along.
How do you learn from others and how long does it take, and what should be the form of the learning and mentoring, and how should that process be evaluated.