BEWARE life experience presented as advice, opinion presented as fact, sweeping generalizations, and unconscious bias.
Packaging a messy life into a neat little story
I’ve been on several composer panels and a podcast recently, and one of the tasks one must complete for such an event is a quick summary of who you are, what you do, and an overview of your story. By story, I mean how the story of your career has played out, beginning, middle and ending where you are now. All structured and neat and tidy. In 5 minutes or less. Nightmare.
This is a surprisingly hard task. It’s good that this little potted biography is always at the beginning of the event, as I’m very happy to get it out of the way. I find it so difficult because my career feels quite sprawling, messy and meandering. It’s fairly tricky to parse into any sort of clear, well-structured, polished journey.
Extracting advice from that neat little story
The other task on such panels is generally to give advice to ‘aspiring’ composers. I can understand that this comes from a place of generosity and care in most circumstances. However, here’s a big caveat – the advice comes from a person who has the experiences of only one life.
All of the advice one person can possibly give to get to the position they’re in now (with their career, at least) comes within the context of only that one life – with all the associated, specific starting conditions and random, chaotic, chance events that happened along the way. If that’s explicit in the storytelling though, that’s great.
The problem comes when the advice is couched generally rather than in the context of that life – those precise conditions and events. That’s a kind of bias.
Advice given with caveats, and avoiding ‘should’
It’s for this reason that I’ve started to consciously caveat every possible instance of advice-giving (solicited or not, though I try to avoid the latter) with, “In my experience…”.
I try to say what I did, and how that went. I try very hard to avoid the word ‘should’. I’ve been attempting to do that for around 10 years now, and I’m getting ok with it.
The word ‘should’ does slip out now and then, quickly followed by immediate apologies and an attempt to rephrase. It was deliberate in this blog’s title because I’m such a wry wit.
The ‘in my experience’ thing is quite new for me, maybe in the last 3 or 4 years. It must have come to my attention at some point before that that a very large amount of the ‘advice’ I can extrapolate from my meandering, sprawling journey of a career is very different to some of the generally accepted wisdom on building a composing career.
If anything, I’ve done it despite not following the generally accepted wisdom (mostly ‘cos I didn’t know it at the time). So either the generally accepted wisdom is wrong, or I’m some random outlier who’s an exception to the rule. Perhaps I am an aberration.
Extract advice from a larger sample size
Or there’s a mid-way between these two possibilities. Perhaps there are some underlying rules to follow – a deep structure or unified theory – but the specific application from one person to the next needs adaptation.
Either way, we need a sample size greater than N=1. You can’t rely on the advice given based on one person’s life, especially from the person who’s lived that life, because they’re too close to it. They’re biased.
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for months, and then this popped into my email inbox. Here’s a quote from a recent newsletter from Cal Newport (who wrote Deep Work and Digital Minimalism) titled Lessons from Teaching Career Advice to 5,000 Students – emphasis is mine:
“Lesson #5: Don’t Ask People for Advice
Figuring out what skills matter for your career path can be surprisingly tricky. One of the best ways to determine where to aim your deliberate improvement efforts is to learn from those who have already gotten to where you want to go. Getting this information from someone, however, is harder than it seems. Why? As it turns out, most people are very bad at giving advice based on their own experience. If you ask people for their advice, you end up putting them on the spot to come up with something useful sounding to offer in response. This leads to a panicked internal search for anything that sounds right. You’ll end up with coherent advice, but not necessarily the right advice. The better alternative is to instead ask people to tell you their story. Like a journalist, extract from them the beats of their career, pushing where needed to help understanding what exactly it was — accomplishments, timing, a particular skill-base — that allowed them to make the more important leaps. Then you should go back through this reporting and extract the relevant advice on your own.”
Ignore the ‘should’ in that last sentence, of course. He should know better.
Photo: Unsplash