I have recently been spending a lot of time on the Quora website, which in my view is the best Q/A site in the world today.

I decided to share my thoughts on what we can learn from advice.

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I like to think of advice as form of data. Any advice you get is based on the data you give to your advisor, and any data he gives back to you is based on his past experience data. (Great post from Brad Feld on this topic The Benefit of Mentor Whiplash - Feld Thoughts)

Keeping this in mind, there are two very important variables do think about.

1. Firstly, that lessons and experiences from the past, don’t necessarily have anything to do with what will happen in the future (excellent book on this topic is ”@http://www.amazon.com/The-Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness/dp/081297381X“).

1. Secondly, it is very rare that your advisor has the time to fully understand the situation you are in. In most occasions advise is given after the advisor has only had a few minutes of a conversation to enable feedback.

Keeping this in mind I would suggest to anyone to surround themselves with as many mentors and advisors as possible, to get a broad view of the data you are seeking advise on. Specialists will often you give you opposite answers. You will have more data on the topic after each advisor you talk with, hopefully giving you a higher probability of a good decision.

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http://www.quora.com/Life/What-are-good-ways-to-learn-from-advice

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