NOT TAKING ADVICE CAN BE THE BEST ADVICE OF ALL

I try to take a break from social media for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year.

“Try” is the operative word here; I find it hard to stay away from Twitter, especially when I want to rant about my football team’s most recent shortcomings, or to rave about a particularly stellar performance by a racehorse.

But I do my very best to keep away from LinkedIn. Mainly because the turn of the year sees the platform deluged by people’s New Year resolutions, and their inspirational and motivational musings designed to help other business owners.

The overwhelming majority of such postings are driven, I accept, by the best of intentions. There is much to like about any person who takes the time to share their thoughts on how you can run your business, and your life, in a more effective and efficient manner in the months ahead.

You can, though, have too much of a good thing. The cumulative effect of all those postings is to feel bombarded, and ultimately to resent slightly even the most compelling and well-written offerings.

The older I get, and the more experienced I become as a business owner, the more resistant I am to one-size-fits-all posts giving me advice on the way I should conduct myself over the next 12 months.

That doesn’t mean I won’t listen; you always need to keep an open mind, and you can never rule out the possibility of learning something useful and insightful.

The two types of advice

It strikes me that there are two distinct types of advice that you can give and receive when it comes to running a business. I'd summarise them as follows:

1)   General. This is what I would call structural advice that relates to the things that all businesses should be doing. There are hundreds of examples, but they include thoughts on the need to run your books right, the need to market yourself effectively, and the requirement to produce a top quality product.

2)   Individual. This is different. In the paragraph above, I mentioned the need to market yourself effectively. That’s good advice. Telling you exactly how to do that, and the messaging and channels you should use, is not. For the simple reason that every business is different, just as every business owner is different.

Too much of the advice we are given as business owners – especially in the early stages of planning, launching and building our companies – falls into the latter category. As I say, this is entirely well intentioned; but telling me how to build my business in exactly the same way as someone who might have a totally different way of operating is not totally helpful.

Trusting our instincts

Ultimately, we have to trust our instincts a bit more. I firmly believe that the answers to many of the questions we ask ourselves as business people are already in our own heads, or within easy reach of our fingertips. We just need to believe it.

One of my aims in 2023 is to launch the book I have written on this very subject. It takes a step back from giving people the answers to help them create a successful business, and offers instead the questions that you should ask yourself to ensure the answers you come up with are right for you.

If the book does see the light of day, you can expect to see it all over social media. Well, there might be a couple of tweets and maybe even a LinkedIn post or two. Because I’ll be back on LinkedIn by then.

If you would like to discuss the issues raised here in more detail, or to talk about how my copywriting and communications consultancy might help your business, please get in touch.

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay