The Art Of Ignoring Career Advice

Embrace advice that resonates; Ignor advice that's misaligned

Why work for small companies? Join Google!

Why go to industry? Become a professor!

Why work on traditional ML? Publish on deep learning!

Why write a book? Stop. Turn it into a summary paper.

That’s actual advice I have received and ignored over the years. Well, not successfully, as I found it difficult to act against advice that came from more senior people, even when I had already decided on another path.

This post is about how to deal with advice that doesn’t resonate and when to embrace it.

The Art Of Ignoring Advice

You already ignore most career advice — there is no other way. One blog post tells you to work for Google, your friend wants you to join their start-up, and your boss wants you to stay — in this hypothetical scenario, you have to ignore 2 out of 3 people.

You already have plenty of experience not acting on advice, but it’s different from ignoring advice. For me, ignoring means not letting the dissonance between what you want and what someone else suggests drag you down.

I started my book on interpretable machine learning before I started a Ph.D. on the same topic. An unusual order of doing things, but it shows the path I had chosen: The desire of writing books came first and the Ph.D. was a career choice that would go along with that goal, or so I thought. During my Ph.D. I was advised by multiple professors to not focus on writing the book. No one would ever cite it. Even if I were to go to industry, say Google, I should rather have papers in prestigious venues. And the book? Just turn it into an overview paper!

I still remember vividly a “mentoring session” in which one of the “write-more-papers”- professors actually laughed at me when I told him that the book had already been cited 8 times. This really dragged me down.

But I ignored them and finished the book. Fast forward: The book has been cited more than 4700 times 🤷‍♂️. Fun fact: none of the “write-more-papers-to-get-cited”-profs have a paper with anywhere near that citation count. I usually don’t like to focus on these metrics, but I must admit that it’s rather satisfying 😈. I was so certain that the Interpretable ML book was more important than the papers I was going to write. I’m glad I went with my gut feeling.

The decision seems so clear in hindsight, but it was difficult at the time. I tend to doubt myself a lot, so each time I get career advice it sucks a lot of my mental energy. Or at least used to. Because there is also good advice out there and there are also people who are good at giving advice. So I felt like I had to consider every and each bit of advice I get anew.

But how much consideration and headspace do you give new suggestions and career advice? Here are a few thoughts that helped me get a measure of how to interpret the advice I get.

Question unquestioned advice

General advice is the most difficult to ignore because it’s “wisdom” that an entire community has accepted as self-evident. For example: as a researcher, you should write more papers to be successful. Or: you have to work for a big tech company to be a great data scientist. There are two problems with these suggestions. Sometimes they might have a kernel of truth, but there are so many exceptions to the “rule” that it’s not a good predictor. Second problem: it’s general advice, not advice specific to your priorities and values.

Advice is often more about the person giving the advice than about you

Often people will just recommend what worked for them and what they know. That can be great. If you already know that you want to become a professor, for example, it’s great to get advice from people who achieved that same goal. But if you are rather uncertain where your journey should go, keep in mind that people will be more likely to recommend what worked for them, which may or may not be aligned with your priorities and values. A common example: Profs recommending their Ph.D. students to become profs as well or to at least stay in academia. A healthy perspective: See the advisors’ career path as one example of many, and not as a recommendation. I’m guilty of doing that as well, as I’ve suggested to more than one person to write a book 😇.

Understand incentives

When I was about to quit my first job without having another one lined up, my parents advised me against this. They didn’t consider my financial situation and the job market but were guided by their wish for their child for job security. Is your boss trying to convince you to stay? If you are doing a good job, of course, they would love to continue working with you. Always keep in mind what biases the advisors have and weigh the suggestions by how much they are aligned with your priorities.

The Art of Good Advice

Great! Just ignore all advice, shut yourself off, and do whatever!..?

Obviously, it’s dumb to ignore everything and everyone.

So what does make for good career advice?

Look for people who are great at listening. Those who ask enlighting questions and who are not trying to sell you a certain path.

Listen for advice that resonates, that you immediately detect as “hell yes!”.

I just read a book about note-taking and the following quote stuck with me:

The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control , and to leave the rest aside .

— Tiago Forte, Building A Second Brain

While the quote comes from the context of note-taking, “keep what resonates” is great for many other things in life, such as career advice.

And in that spirit: Did this post resonate with you? If not, ignore it. And if it did resonate, I’d love to hear whether you were in a similar position before or whether you have a difficult career choice to make right now.

Feel free to share this post with anyone who needs “permission” to ignore advice.