Yes. Generally people giving advice publicly are in the advice business, not the business on which they are advising. I worked with a Salesperson who got fired for non-performance, who then reinvented themselves as a Sales guru by publicly giving tons of advice.
People who are experts in their business (as opposed to being advice folks) tend to give it quietly 1 on 1 to people they trust. It’s a Close Friend game rather than an Acquaintance game.
Kind of like a dating "expert". The only way to become such expert is to date a lot, which means you're not very good at dating in the first place. That is, if we assume that the point of dating is to efficiently find somebody for a long term relationship.
Fine, change the term to "relationship expert". If you're good at maintaining a healthy romantic relationship, you'll have two, three, but optimally even one in a lifetime. That doesn't make you an expert, it still is the norm.
If instead you had 30 relationships, whilst for sure you had a lot of experience, I wouldn't really trust your advise as an "expert".
Sure. I was mainly concerned with the idea that most people are dating for marriage which I don't think is the case, at least under age 30.
But I think it's possible to be a relationship expert even with one or two real relationships. Two sets of people that have been married to only one person are not necessarily equally happy or fulfilled. A person could also make relationships their personal interest and spend a lot of time thinking about the topic on top of their lived experience which might make them more capable of giving advice.
I think it's wrong to say anyone giving advice isn't worth listening to.
The problem is that if you want to get married, you should take advice from someone who only ever had to go on one first date, not someone who keeps going on them.
> Generally people giving advice publicly are in the advice business, not the business on which they are advising
Twitter has lots of tech advice, and most of these authors don’t give advice for a living. People like John Carmack regularly share how they achieved things.
Authoring a book or hosting a podcast is btw often not a great deal from an ROI perspective. It could help you get hired, but it’d be way easier to just study leetcode instead.
I think you could cut people and their intentions a bit more slack.
As a former teacher who is currently by all accounts a fairly capable software developer, this saying drives me up a wall.
I took 2 years out of my life to work for almost nothing so I could share my love of math and programming with the next generation. That I eventually gave in and moved into software engineering to make money says far more about my lack of altruism than my competence then or now.
But forget me, I taught in a cushy city post, I know some people in the peace corps (I taught abroad) who are still in the game, teaching math and English out in the sticks, sometimes having to build or maintain their own school buildings and learning the local language with no assistance. The idea that the defining trait of teachers is a lack of competence is laughable.
Please don't perpetuate the misuse of this phrase, which is so often used to denigrate those with expertise and desire trying so hard to pass them on.
Consider the possibility, say, in a guild context: those who can, do. They work for the guild, and do whatever the guild does. Those who can't, from age, infirmity, injury: they teach, passing on knowledge and wisdom.
In my experience this is likely one half of a principle in which there are at least as many examples of people who can do things really well, but have no idea how to pedagogically transmit the building blocks of their domain understanding to others in a tractionable way.
Maybe a more wholistic take on this is something like:
'Those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach would really be doing everyone a huge favor if they would just go do somewhere.'
If this is a more complete take, it suggests to me that the master/apprentice paradigm existed for so long for a reason; masters have spent their lives specializing narrowly, not necessarily transmitting their understanding, thus the deconstruction of their expertise is only accessible via osmosis over time, because essentially they can't teach.
People who are experts in their business (as opposed to being advice folks) tend to give it quietly 1 on 1 to people they trust. It’s a Close Friend game rather than an Acquaintance game.