The best advice comes with another person understanding you. In fact, the best advice could even originate from you. The other person isn’t forcing you into a solution; they genuinely want to understand the problem, and in the process of doing that, help you understand it better as well. They know how to ask you the right questions or frame the problem. (That’s what makes them a good advisor.)

All advice is best taken as a suggestion, not a directive. Think before blindly following someone’s advice. You don’t need to overthink; a simple pros and cons list will do, or making a simple, cheap, way to test someone’s advice to see if it works for you.

If someone’s advice makes you feel bad, like you did something wrong, remember that’s probably not the person’s intention. There’s a chance that the person giving the advice hasn’t necessarily mastered it. There’s a chance that they remember it because they are also wrestling with it—or have made a mistake in the past. If someone is weaponizing advice, they are not trying to give you advice.

Mass-produced advice—such as books, YouTube videos, social media threads, etc.—is more of an entertainment form than it is genuine advice. People produce this form of media because cloaking their personal branding messages and sales pitches in the structure of advice works. Take this genre of advice with a degree of discernment. Much of this advice is meant to help the person making the media, not the person needing the advice. (The irony is not lost on me.)

Measure progress by the times you apply and adhere to the advice, not all of the times you fall short of it. When you come across good, energizing, advice, try to write it down on your phone or somewhere you’ll see it all the time so you can remember to apply it.