Three types of advice givers: A simple trick to identify advice givers to seek out and the advice givers to avoid

Getting advice is so easy. Unsolicited advice is available for free parents, spouses, family, friends, so called well-wishers. The less you ask for it, the more you will receive. However good advice is worth its weight in gold if you ask the right person. Great counsel is really helpful. I follow one rule to classify advice givers into three categories. Once advice givers are classified into three categories, it is very easy to identify the advice givers to seek out and the advice givers to avoid.


The first step in getting great advice is finding the right person who will give great advice. I classify advice gives as

1. Players or Ex-players = Champions, winners or losers
2. Coaches
3. Spectators  

Players
The person who is fit to give advice to you is a person who has personally handled a situation on which you need help. Preferably, we need advice from current players and not from retired players. This means that we need to take advice from individuals who have handled the situation you are struggling with recently and not some decades ago. In the absence of having access to current players, then ex-players should also be sought out. We need to take advice from champion players, people who have successfully handled situations. It’s may be worthwhile to learn from the experiences of unsuccessful people who can analyses why they failed and help you with things to do to avoid failure.

Coaches
If you are unable to find a player who could give you advice, then you should look at a coach. A coach who has who has track record of advising multiple people to success is a great person. It would be great if the coach is an ex-player, even better if the coach is a champion ex-champion player.

Spectators
Spectators are those who have never handled a situation (or something close to the situation) you are grappling with but have thousands of anecdotes to share. I would like to avoid such people for taking advice.

For those who don’t have access to players and coaches, spectators still have some utility. Their utility is that from their anecdotes you may get to know the names of some players or coaches. They may be able to provide you with connections to players or coaches.

How to make use of this classification

• I write down the all the unsolicited and solicited advice I receive
• Next to the advice I add the name of the advice giver
• Next to the name of the advice giver I add the category of the advice giver i.e. player, coach and spectator.
• I then review the advice received based on the category of the advice giver