“One of the markers of expertise is being able to see what novices cannot.”
Interesting implication: as a novice you can’t evaluate advice based on what you think is right / what you think makes sense / what you think SHOULD be true.
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Corollary: as a novice, it’s easier to improve at evaluating a person’s track record than it is to improve at evaluating the internal logic and applicability of ideas or advice.
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How do you get better at evaluating track records?
The advice is mostly similar to hiring:
- Ask for concrete detail about past successes. (Discount if they stick to abstractions / principles)
- Get better at checking references.
- Look for hard-to-fake proof of work.
Replying to
One trick I’ve found useful: during the initial meetings, be curious and ask for stories.
This kills two birds with one stone: people like telling stories, and you get to evaluate their believability when asking for future advice.
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I’ve written more about this here: commoncog.com/blog/believabi
But the core idea is really that you can’t evaluate the quality of actionable advice when you are yourself a novice, so you need alternative means of evaluating truth.
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I’d listen to the two episodes with Graham Duncan on the Tim Ferriss podcast: tim.blog/tag/graham-dun
Context: Duncan is a capital allocator, and he made it his goal to be the ‘best in the world at reference checks’ a couple of decades ago.
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