Knowledge and free speech is potentially crippling the progress of humanity. If in 1970, you learned by books and maybe a teacher. In 2018, we learn by podcasts, forums, videos, blogs, and books. The problem is a lot of information is 1) repeated already, and sometimes inadvertently since people don’t always know if someone else has said the same thing, 2) inefficient – people love to tell long stories and such to help the entertainment portion of it, which entertainment is good if it creates emotion which helps us learn/retain info, but it’s often too much, and 3) not appropriately structured and 4) usually a disguised sales pitch for something else, usually proving expertise in a topic just enough to build trust, but not enough so that anyone’s learned anything of deep substance.

If you were to want to learn chemistry in 1970, you read a well organized and peer evaluated book that doesn’t repeat itself and is no sales pitch for something else and you learn chemistry. In the age of Google, you may be reading Chapter One 50 times over because of all the random YouTube videos, aimless but entertaining podcasts, incorrect info on a blog that’s being debated in the Discus forum below the article, and so on. Before you know it, you’ve wasted tremendous time and not gotten as far as the guy with the lone book. Knowledge…you can have too much of a good thing.

If someone is able to mentor you, stop quizzing them to see if their advice is “worthy” for you or not. Very few people are likely personally offering to help you, and you’re likely not so inundated with helpful people that you need to start eliminating the people that have worthless advice because they’re not “qualified” enough.

You’re not that busy (that you can’t listen for a moment to someone wanting to help), people aren’t that helpful (that they’re going out of their way to help you personally), and you need to start taking what you can get. Listen to the advice you get, and if it seems bad then either: a) research whether they’re qualified to give you advice that seems wrong to you, or b) stop listening to them moving forward because it’s simply bad advice.

Most of the time good advice is clear and intuitively accurate after you hear it.

The exception to this is the legal system, because what’s illegal may not always make a lot of intuitive sense. Beware of tasks like this where you’ll waste more time in researching whether you should listen to them rather than just listening to begin with.

Make everyone your mentor.