Advice Has a Date on It

Most advice from successful people is true.

It's just true for them, now.

Someone with a large audience says to post less and focus on quality.

They're probably right, for an account where every post already reaches a lot of people and the hard part is not wearing them out.

Someone at the start hears the same sentence and posts twice a month to nobody.

Same advice. Different year.

The trouble is that advice rarely comes with a date on it.

It gets given from wherever the person is standing today, and today they have things the listener doesn't: an audience, a reputation, a list, a budget, a body of work that does some of the selling for them.

What got them there is often something they stopped doing years ago and don't think about anymore.

That isn't dishonesty.

People just remember the present more clearly than the beginning.

So before taking a piece of advice, it's worth asking what stage it was written for.

A few questions help.

What did this person have when they started?

If the answer is an existing following, money to test with, or a name people already knew, their early moves won't transfer cleanly.

What were they doing in their first year, not their fifth?

That's usually harder to find, and usually more useful.

And would the advice still make sense if the numbers were a hundred times smaller?

"Stop chasing followers" is sensible at a hundred thousand.

At forty, the followers are the whole problem.

None of this means ignoring people who are further along.

They know things.

It means reading them the way a map gets read, by checking where the "you are here" marker is before following the route.

The most useful advice for an early stage often comes from someone only a little ahead.

They still remember what it was like.

The details haven't been smoothed over yet.

Good advice taken at the wrong time is just bad advice with better credentials.