A better way to ask for advice, via negativa

My usual go-to question when asking someone for advice for a specific topic is:

“What are the top 3 things that brought 80% of the results?”

But I got to admit, it’s a question looking for quick hacks.

It’s a question that doesn’t really account for the complexity of the context.
It’s a question that possibly invites post hoc narrative-shaping.
It’s a question that may fail to account for things outside of their control, like luck.

This tweet by @dickiebush made me realize that:

My go-to question for people ahead of me on a path I want to take:

What is something people spend too much time on that I should skip entirely?

This works better than “what should I focus on?” because most people don’t know what led to their success, but they know what didn’t.

That last line is so true.

I was asking the wrong question all along.

Because that’s true to my experience as well, especially in some of the games of life and career where the relationship between effort and reward isn’t linear or predictable. Like going viral on Twitter. Or being able to convert customers. Oftentimes, just when I thought I got it nailed down, something else comes up and makes me question my ability and my role in the success.

Most of the time, it was due to random chance and luck. And there’s nothing I can do with that, no lesson to learn from it.

But I definitely knew what didn’t work.

Just tweeting without intention didn’t work.
Just trying different marketing channels without collecting data didn’t work.
Just doing it without consistency didn’t work.

So a better question to ask is to ask about what not to do.

“What is something people spend too much time on that I should skip entirely?”

What’s the top 3 mistakes you made that you don’t wish on someone else in similar shoes?

What did you focus on back then that you now wished otherwise?

What would your current self tell your past self on what not to do?

I love this.

The via negativa approach to seeking advice.

Will put this into practice in the future.