Anti advice

Advice isn’t really useful. The most successful people keep to-do lists, wake up at 5 AM, or maybe they do the opposite.

All advice is full of implicit survivorship bias.

But Anti advice can be useful.

But my advice is generally that they don’t need advice. You don’t need advice at 17. You need experiences. You don’t need to be told what to do, you need to be told to do.

Now, that in itself could be construed as advice, but it’s really not meant as that. It’s anti-advice, if anything. Don’t listen. You’ll learn out there, not in this email.

—Jason Fried, Founder of Basecamp

Here are some snippets of anti-advice. Much of it might not be applicable to your case, and probably it has survivorship bias too. But often the most interesting writing tells you why you’re wrong, so hopefully some of these will be interesting to you.