An incomplete guide to finding trustworthy advice.

Issue #280 of the Better Humans Newsletter. Subscribe here for inspiration and knowledge.

I’ve been in a lot of conversations at work about what makes for a valuable article. I don’t mean money valuable, I mean valuable to the reader.

The easiest to judge is whether an article was entertaining. But the hardest to judge is whether an article made the reader a better human. What are we going to do, follow the reader around afterward? This is why we had this Better Humans publication attached to a coaching organization. They created a feedback loop about what sort of things worked and what didn’t.

This talk about article value, BTW, is a source of reasonable anxiety for a lot of authors at Medium because it implies change (but also hopefully opportunity). If I had better guidance to give authors, I would. But it’s hard to talk about and hard to design. All I can say with certainty is that there has to be a better way to make advice on Medium more valuable to our readers.

But that’s all author stuff. I want to talk to readers and focus on self-improvement since that’s the long-term topic of this newsletter.

I don’t think you can understand self-improvement advice without understanding one very problematic pattern. To explain, my first thought was an old Star Wars reference.

“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

That’s tongue-in-cheek. The vast majority of the self-improvement industry is well-meaning and effective. It’s just a minority that’s hiding steroid use behind a story about eating animal intestines or promoting basic discipline habits that end up being an on-ramp to misogyny and fascism. IYKYK.

The problematic pattern is that it is very hard to sell good advice to people without navigating their belief systems. That’s why some advice is peppered with poorly verified scientific studies (appeals to science lovers) and other advice is filled with metaphysical references (appeals to science skeptics). Neither is strictly accurate, but if they can connect with people’s diverse beliefs, then they can generate action. And generating action is the thing that matters.

The most common and simplest to understand belief is that people come to this type of advice with a lot of self-doubt. So the writers of this advice will very often speak with more confidence than the advice deserves. This both helps the advice giver make money and helps the advice receiver feel confident enough to take action.

All of this is why it feels like you are wading through a constant stream of self-improvement bullshit. A lot of what sounds like bullshit to you sounds like gold to some other target audience. Importantly, this works both ways.

Once I realized that, I actually opened myself to more forms of self-improvement. Now I can get my science-loving brain to sit through some magic energy mysticism by just reminding myself, “All of this is a useful mental construct.”

I’m exposing myself as a utilitarian here. I’ve gravitated to focus most on how well the advice works. That’s very different from how the advice is packaged.

That’s a long-winded way to get to a simple answer. The number one thing I’m looking for in an advice article is first-hand experience. That is the biggest predictor of whether advice is going to be valuable to you. In our Better Humans style guide, we aimed for advice that came from one of three sources:

1. Describe what happened when you tried the advice on yourself

2. Describe what happens when other people have tried your advice

3. Do original research

The first one is why when I talk about boosting more credible articles on Medium, I’m quick to remind people that they are an expert in their own experience.

The nice thing about reading self-experiments is that they are less likely to over-promise. As a reader, you can spot the ways that the author might be very different from you.

The second category tends to be coaches, trainers, therapists, and doctors. The third category tends toward professors and other researchers.

There’s a lot of subtle value that comes from first-hand experience, but what I like most is that first-hand experience connects the authors to the results.

You would never accept a cookbook of recipes that had never been cooked. But a huge amount of information, and I’m referring even to the highest levels of journalism, is completely disconnected from reality.

I watched a MasterClass of a well-known author who was 100% focused on finding interesting stories and then crafting them into memorable ideas. At no point did he ever mention or consider how these ideas impacted his readers. To me, that’s a shame.

That’s like proposing a recipe for a new dessert concept, but never cooking it so that you can verify the ingredients, the measurements, and most importantly, whether the dessert even tastes good.

This all may sound kind of basic so far. But I’m really worked up about it. Why do we allow so much untested information to get traction?

Of course, I hope Medium can do something to counterbalance it in our advice categories. But I also think a lot of it comes down to having suspicious readers. Go be suspicious, even of me. When you are hearing advice, does the advice giver know anything about what they are talking about?

(For me in this newsletter, the feedback loop I had as a publisher was our coaching clients. I still lean on that experience.)