Why You're Drawn to Simplified Advice
Level 3: Master of the Mundane
PSST.
Hey YOU.
Yea you. Right over there.
C'mere.
Yeaaa that's it.
Eyes right down here.
I've got something for you.
Hey! Hey, don't get distracted now.
This is the real deal. This is the thing which is going to be the answer to all your dreams.
You see,
It's simpler than you think.
All this time you've been toiling away and making your life and your goals so much harder. You don't have to do all of that work. You don't have to flail around and wonder how you're going to succeed at your goals.
You just need this 1 thing ...
A world simplified
This is such a slippery topic to write about. Simplified and simple ideas/concepts/things are not inherently bad, wrong, incorrect etc.
But there is a complex issue with simplified advice/guidance/ideas in which they can blind you to the stuff that matters most while setting you down a path that slowly (or quickly) takes you away from the life you really want to be living.
The inherent nature of simplified advice is that it inevitably takes you away from YOU.
So,
That's what I'm attempting to unpack here.
In a non-simplified, possibly boring way.
(Which is the other side of the coin ... we naturally turn away from the boring stuff when that's what can often help us the most)
You could ... simplify (hah) ... this down to short vs long dopamine, but that would be doing a disservice to your awareness and understanding.
(is that irony?)
So, in we go.
Simplified concepts which catch our eye are often large amounts of dopamine packed into oversimplified statements. They tend to visually/mentally compresses the perceived time to reward by causing you to skip over all the stuff that actually makes things work.
Here are several examples.
"Just build an email list."
The promises of this include that you'll have an endless bastion of sales for as long as you email your list. You'll have an independent audience which can't be taken away from you. You'll have the ability to grow whatever business you want no matter what because you'll have an audience of people eating out of your hand every time you email.
"All you have to do is validate your idea and make a sale."
The promises of this include that, if you can do this, then you have a business, and all your dreams are within your grasp. It promises that if you dream of owning a business and living your own free independent life, then all you need to do is come up with ideas, validate one, make a sale, and boom you're there.
"Nail your USP and the market is yours."
The promise of this includes that a successful business is as simple as just identifying and communicating your unique selling proposition (USP). As if the USP is the only thing standing in the way of you having the millions of dollars and freedom you desire.
"All you need is 1 funnel."
The promise of this includes that you are just 1 funnel away from millions and total life freedom. That the only thing you have to figure out is a funnel and all your problems will be solved. etc.
"Turn challenges into opportunities."
The promise of this is that you don't have to feel bad about the challenges/failures you face. More than that, you get to see the challenges/failures you face as opportunties to exploit. That failure is not failure it's actually success.
"Just stop eating carbs."
The promise of this is that all you need to do to lose weight and have the body of your dreams is to stop eating carbs.
"Just tell stories."
The promise of this is that the missing key to getting people buying your stuff and having a rabid fan base is in telling stories. All you need to do is tell stories in your marketing and your stuff will sell itself.
"All you need is this fancy camera to take great pictures."
The promise is you can take professional award winning quality pictures if you just have professional equipment. That the reason your photos are boring/uninteresting right now is because you don't have the right gear.
"It's all about your headline / subject line"
The promise of this is that your ads, emails, articles, sales pages will all be successful if you nail the headline. That the challenges and problems you face with your marketing can be easily solved by getting the headline 'right.'
---
I could go on.
And in fact I deleted several from this list because the repetitive themes have become clear.
But more on that in a minute ...
Because I want to explore the other side.
The boring advice.
The boring stuff we ignore
Again with the slippery subject because boring stuff often has the appearance of simplicity. In fact the boring stuff is often so simple we reject it out of hand because it's "too simple" (even if we don't consciously acknowledge that's why we're rejecting it).
We have a natural bias towards complexity.
We want the complex stuff, the tricks, the tips, because we think that since we haven't "figured it out" yet it's got to be something we don't know about.
The answer HAS to be something which we haven't heard or seen otherwise we'd understand exactly what to do to have the life we want and to do what we want, to have the success we desire, etc.
Right?
You can probably already see why we're drawn towards simplification because it makes complex tricks/tips and 'new' stuff easily digestible. It lacks the contextual framework which ironically makes it far more likely we'll apply our OWN context to someone else's understanding and in that way it almost fits better.
“Duh I have to have an email list, that's obviously super profitable and such an easy way to make a lot of money and have an audience for years to come.”
But there's a lifetime of context that has to be applied before we can understand if "build an email list" is the right decision for us individually.
By contrast,
The boring stuff does not come with a “context void” begging to be subconsciously filled.
Here's a few bits of boring advice,
Based on TGA principles:
Find the thing you're good at and enjoy doing and just do that thing, over and over and over again. (Frequency)1
Don't try to reach for higher highs or beat your best, just slowly improve on your worst. (Raise the Floor)2
The only data that matters is yours. The only reality that matters is yours. It supersedes all advice/guidance/proof from external sources.
Engage the field. Do the thing. Get data. Reflect on it. Do the thing again.3
Aside from not having a real context void which you consciously or subconsciously try to fill, one of the core traits of boring advice is that there is no promise. No "if you do this you'll get rich and be the sexiest person alive" promise in what's boring.
Because the outcome of doing the boring things is solely determined by YOU and your life and your uniqueness.
The only thing that can be said of boring things is that an outcome is certain, and that if you apply yourself with the perspective of changing your behavior based on what you discover, learning and growth are inevitable.
You might not “get what you want” tomorrow, but if you keep playing the game it’s inevitable.4
What's more, the boring stuff is actually simple. It doesn't just have the appearance of simplicity, it is usually actually just simple.
Because the stuff that works is just simple.
I'm a writer. So all I really need to do is write and write and write and write. Is there nuance that unfolds from this? Yea. But I'm not engaging in "do this get that" promise. I'm just setting myself down a path.
Raising the Floor - just improve on your worst month (as an example). When you start doing this the first time, it feels so ... dumb. Like how could I possibly have success and growth if I just make a little bit more than my worst month? Well, you might not. But it can't hurt to try, and no matter what you reduce the likelihood that you earn less. (Or do/have less of whatever metric your measuring here)
Just get your own data ... this one is actually difficult if you don't believe in yourself, or don't trust yourself. If you don't have self awareness or trust/belief in your own abilities and outcomes then you might get data and put no value in it. But the fact of the matter is, when it comes to making YOUR life the way you want it there's no other data or outcomes that matter than the ones that come from you doing things in the way YOU do them.
It feels obvious writing that, but the concept alone may very well be one of those things you have to experience yourself to know.
Engage the Field. Just do things. How much more boring can you get? There's no promise. No specificity. No recipe. No step by step guide.
Just ...
Do things.
Observe. Reflect.
Do more things.
As long as you reflect and modify your behavior based on your experience and continue going through that cycle you can't help but actually grow.
It's all so....
Boring.
And unless you've experienced the outcome for yourself by doing those things, you have no context void to fill in and imagine a feeling in the present moment of what can be.
Does that make sense?
When I say,
All you need to do is build an email list and email it every day and you can easily make $500k/year, you start filling in with your imagination what that can look like for you. And it's easy to fill that in if you have experience in that environment and a desire to have a life that looks like what could be if you go down that path.
But all that is just your imagination.
By contrast when I say "find what you do well and enjoy doing, and do it over and over and over again" there's no end point to create a gap for you to fill. You either believe in that process or you don't. And unless you buy into the words and ideas of the person sharing it, likely that boring ass advice is going to be something you glaze right over ...
Because you can't imagine what it will do for you.
This is why one of our very BASIC concepts is "The Process is The Shortcut."5
Because the fastest way to get what you want is to make the process your goal ... there's no context gap to fill with your imagination if you just accept the process is where you are now and that's just the path you're walking on.
Since we are so inclined to live in the past and the future more often than the present, we live and take action based on our fears and our imaginations. Fears of what were and what could be, but never what actually is.
We gravitate towards emotional peaks for our navigation.
"That sounds exciting let's do that!"
What is exciting?
DOPAMINE is exciting.6
Look at those simplistic promises.
They compress out so much effort and retain so much reward that when you imagine yourself just hacking a funnel together and turning it on you can feel the excitement of millions of dollars racing into your bank account.
All at the flick of a button.
Of course, you can't image all the fear and doubt that is inevitable if you set yourself down that path. You can't imagine the dissonance you'll experience when the thing you're doing doesn't align well with who you are - nor will you likely be able to see that if you're so dead focused on the simplistic 'thing'.
And in full irony to the situation where you get dopamine imagining what could be - dopamine is a PRESENT MOMENT EXPERIENCE.
In the moment where you get high off the promise of being just 1 funnel away, you're literally getting present dopamine off an imagined future, and being in neither place to appreciate or be aware of it.
Why this is bad
I don't often like to be dogmatic about things, but ... I can't find a better word than ‘bad’. I think simplification of ideas is BAD for a few reasons:
To start off with, it tricks you into thinking the path is shorter than it is.
A simplified concept compresses and cuts out the stuff which is actually meaningful, gets you to focus on the one main step and the ultimate outcome and lets you fill the gaps with your imagination.
This causes you to do the disservice to yourself of devaluing the small steps along the way. Of devaluing the process which can lead you where you want to go.
Cutting carbs might be effective and useful for you but if you don't take the long natural road in full self awareness to find out what works for you and your body, even if it DOES “work” for you, you'll have no awareness to understand why or feel the full benefit of that self actualization.
It's almost a version of Form over Function.7
Where the simplified concept focuses you on the THING that's going to get you the outcome you desire, instead of moving forward with the function you want to enact and allowing the thing to emerge from that function.
(Example: Focusing on just building an email list = form. Focusing on writing a lot = function for me, and from there an email list can emerge if it’s right)
Simplification can lead you to think YOU are bad, because, if it’s so simple, why haven't you been able to figure it out? (and no, the answer isn't “because no one has showed you but thank the lord I'm here now”).
Simplified understanding is always discerned and disseminated in reverse, with vision that is perfect looking backwards, knowing the outcome for the situation being referenced.
In other words, the person using their own experience as advice can look back and see all the 'correct' choices they made, but without awareness it's really hard to know that those choices were objectively good in context, and it's also really hard to acknowledge when certain necessary components were pure luck.
Why this is tricky
I might have been able to title this article "Yes, But ..."
Because all the "advice" is rooted in truth ... BUT ... it lacks the necessary context for it to be useful to YOU.
Yes, people make a living just on email lists. People lose a lot of weight and live healthy lives cutting out carbs. People crack challenges in their business and see explosive growth through identifying strong USPs.
Blah blah blah.
There's truth in it, but when you look back from the successful outcome to cherry pick the steps along the way, the person doing this devalues the entire process and leaves you open to exploitation because of the fact being presented (that "it works").
And even when the simplified advice is obviously way too simple, we can end up so blinded by the logic and the outcome and the promise, and the context void presented with it sucks us in to keep us tricked into thinking that we're smarter.
"Just build an email list - Well yea I know it's more complicated than that but I can figure it out, so I'm still going to do it.”
And yet, can you be truthful with yourself in this moment and look back at simplified advice which pulled you in and distracted you for far longer than you'd like?
Why do we chose Simplified over Boring?
In our human mindset, we have a default draw to what is exciting, to what is new.
Something we haven't heard.
Something which represents the new, the change that we desire. Especially if that something is presented to us in a way which feels like its achievable.
And this is what happens in a simplified idea. We're shown the doubt of our ways, given a seed of hope in a single answer we can focus on, and then presented a context void in which we fill our own hopes and dreams.
We think more is the answer.
If you've been around TGA awhile you know that we caution ourselves against this perspective. "More" is the path you travel down which you can never complete. It's the bucket which can never be filled. It's a goal that has no definition and no direction. More is impossible to achieve, and cannot therefore fulfill your unique potential, your unique purpose and meaning in life.
We think in order to become something we are not we have to do something which is new and exciting to us. We think in order to get the success we desire we have to do something different than we're doing now.
More.
Different.
New.
We want to be driven by excitement for the thing.
And that makes us incredibly vulnerable to simplified guidance that feeds off that human mindset.
Beyond the advice itself … is where that advice and guidance comes from.
Why we seek external advice instead of internal understanding.
It's much more difficult to slow down, be present, listen, to hear and accept your own internal voice than it is to let that voice be drowned by the noise and to then give your attention to the loudest voice amongst that noise.
Because that's your choice.
Slow down and listen to yourself.
Or go fast and chase after the loudest voice which is drowning everything else out.
The benefit of listening to someone else and their advice is that if it doesn't go according to plan, you have someone else to blame. Whereas if you listen to and trust yourself and it doesn't go according to plan, you've only got yourself to blame and most people can't handle that.
Most people can't handle the self efficacy to accept that you alone hold the strings of your own fate.
So not only are we drawn to simplified advice because it makes us feel better and externalizes the solution of our problems, but we also take other people's simplified advice because then we can also externalize the source of the solution.
This eliminates our need to work out self understanding, we just do what other people say, and if all goes wrong, there's plenty of external sources we can lay blame to. Bad advice. Bad advice giver. Etc.
How do you identify simplified advice and what you do about it?
I believe the best answer to this is my running theme ...
Look to yourself.
Have presence and self awareness to understand who you are, what you really want, and why you're doing the things you do. Let go of all other expectations.
Be super REAL about what you really want.
About what really deep down drives you and what's really important.
Because then, when you see advice and guidance out in the world, and you think there might be something useful in it, you can always ask of yourself 'but does this really matter to me?' and 'what does this look like for me?' and 'how does this actually fit and work for me in my life?' and other related questions.
When you tear down the veil and realize that nothing matters except in the context of how you uniquely live your own life and do things, it becomes easier to look at advice and recognize when it's missing a ton of context or when it may necessitate something that is not you.
Building an email list might be a useful strategy for you, but it might also actually not contribute at all to your present goals and the life you are trying to live (outside of the loose promise of the money you'd like to have).
Cutting out carbs might be an effective way to quickly lose fat, but you might also discover that you can't maintain that when you start feeling like garbage and even if you stick with it for a long time you end up regressing back up to your previous mean anyway, because that just doesn't work actually work for you and the way you prefer to live your life.
The other thing you can do with advice/guidance/ideas you run across is ask yourself 'what's the promise?'
Because boring and basic advice and ideas will not come with a promise. That's a big reason why they are boring. There's no dopamine attached to them.
As my QiGong Master8 says of the lessons he was taught, all the exercises used to be called "do this."
That's all that really matters ... everything after the 'doing this' is the truth in yourself and your life that will be revealed to you.
If you can pay attention.
If you can hear and see yourself. If you can slow down, let the noise dissipate, and then take one little step forward at a time in the context of what matters only to you.
Then maybe,
Just maybe,
You’ll find yourself drawn to what is boring.
PS.
Want to discuss this live?
We’re starting up some informal “righteous hangs” for TGA+ members. Come to the next one and let’s talk. Refute me, agree with me, share your experiences, get clarity, bring clarity - I’m here for it all.
(We’ll have a post with information on joining the next “Righteous Hang” soon - and I’ll update here with a link as well when that’s available)
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
, CMO The Guardian Academy
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Appreciate the encouragement to cast a wary eye toward simplistic and over-simplified definitions, descriptions, and directions.