An Antidote to Hubris: Giving Good Advice & Creating Lasting Trust (In a Skeptical World)
And why this matters more than ever in the new AI era.
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A long time ago I learned that who you get advice from matters.
And good advice is priceless.
These days, I am routinely relied on to give advice, and knowing the value of good advice (and more importantly the dangers of bad advice) I set out to learn a way to give good advice most of the time.
Improvising didn’t make me right often enough…
And simply saying “I don’t know.” wasn’t helpful.
So, the way I discovered to always have a renewed spring of good advice for others was both very simple and uncomfortable to actually follow through with doing.
A Simple Method Easier Said Than Done
If a CEO asks me a question about what they should do next in their business…
I go talk to their customers.
If an author asks me what they should do with their next book…
I go talk to their readers.
Even if I’m wondering what to do next in my own business…
I stop wondering and I go talk to my audience.
Because I learned early on that any creator’s greatest danger is becoming disconnected from the people they create for.
And creating something that means a lot to them, triggers all of their tendencies to delay, and starves all the other things that need their attention—only for what they make to end up being only relevant to them and no one else.
Sounds obvious, but one of the first things someone does when they experience success is begin to believe they are too good for the activities that brought them success.
As soon as they get someone else to do those things, they inevitably forget what it’s like.
And they start adapting to different kinds of challenges like battling hubris.
Most people win out in the end, but the goal of good advice, in my mind, is to help creators and value providers battle hubris and better yet, winning content that resonates with the people they set out to help.
As often as I can, I remind those I help that:
The Best Way to Stay Grounded and Relevant is By Focusing on Others
By focusing on others from the start, you can ensure anything you spend your time on will have an audience for it.
And that nothing you create will be in danger of being relevant to no one.
But more importantly than that, staying grounded by focusing on who will actually be impacted by something is a superpower in more ways than one:
It will make you innovative because you know how people actually connect with something and can easily imagine more ways they can connect with it in the future.
It will make you honest because they will be honest with you in their feedback.
It will make you more creative, as you piece together the patterns of what people say (and what they mean) in your subconscious after your conversations.
It will make you world-class, because if you improve what they ask,
It will make you trustworthy—if you follow up with someone’s suggestion with action they will place their trust in you in the future.
And in our new AI-influenced world, where we aren’t 100% sure if the people we are reading from are even real humans anymore, that trust is priceless.
Even someone who is living the good life on the other side of success can reconnect with others and what it’s like to create solely for them—and in the process go on to create their best work long after they thought that time passed.
But the most surprising effect of this advice is not the honesty and transparency it brings to what is being worked on…
But the shift in awareness it brings to the person receiving the advice for the better.
Get More of What You Need By Helping Others Get What They Need
It turns out, what is good for what you’re making, is also good for the person making it.
As shifting your focus to others and how they can benefit from what you’re making, comes with surprising benefits for the maker.
The known benefits of focusing your attention on the needs of others are:
Anxiety drops dramatically when you focus on the well-being of others.
Volunteers or those who live in service of others live longer lives and experience less chronic pain and lower blood pressure.
Thoughts of acts of service stimulate the brain’s pleasure pathways.
Compassion makes you happier and lowers the risk of dementia.
In many ways, helping others and staying grounded by focusing on their needs seems to be an effective way of helping us meet our own.
And this isn’t the only elusive thing that can come to us through the counter-productive method of actually connecting with and helping other people.
As Viktor Frankl, inventor of Logotherapy, Auschwitz survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, puts it,
“Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.
So, when you speak to those who would be impacted by a decision, good insight, and good relevant advice ensues.
And when you connect to a cause that is greater than yourself, happiness ensues.
That’s why, while the idea of reaching out to masses of people for their unfiltered feedback can sound, at best tedious, at worse terrifying… it is ultimately one of the most transformative things you can do.
And making others your anchor will not only make you more effective but help you enjoy the role you fulfill more as well.
Who is This Advice Applicable To and How?
Content creators - who want to create content that is always relevant and moving.
Business owners - who would rather go deeper with their current loyal customers instead of spending 10x the energy to convince new people to become fans.
Executives - who want to be a force for good inside organizations and help them actually benefit people.
Leaders - who want to become someone worth following and stay following.
In any job or position where you have to work with other people, a better understanding of what’s good for others and how they need you to help them will help you become effective.
And most importantly, this grounding focus helps stave off the #1 cause of failure: hubris.
We’ve all heard the axiom, “pride cometh before the fall.”
Pride isn’t inherently bad, and I think you should feel proud of what you’ve made.
But the danger is: if you feel above it and disconnect from the impact what you make has on others, then you can miss it when that impact starts to shift. And that connection becomes severed.
Luckily, grounding your focus on others is a simple, but potent antidote to hubris.
An Antidote to Hubris
Hubris is the difference between sustainable success and short-lived success.
And empathy is the antidote.
Whether administered late, to help a creator reconnect to their audience…
Or early, to inspire someone who is capable of success, but delaying it for fear of what happens next—to actualize it.
Starting with others in mind can keep you humble. Focusing only on what is necessary. Often people create their successes when they can’t afford any focus on what isn’t necessary.
And when it becomes about anything other than that, we risk becoming disconnected from the ones we are meant to be serving in the first place.
The point isn’t to fear that happening, but to expect it to happen as a natural part of the process.
If you’re the creator: chase your ideas to their ends, and then take the time to reconnect to who you made it for, and then finish and ship it.
If you’re the guide: support others in chasing their ideas to their ends, and then remind them when they’ve completed their cycle of who they made it for in the first place. Ask them to consider them, and what they think their impression and experience will be. And if there’s anything they can do to improve it now based on that.
Philosophically this speaks to turning more parts of the creative process, and growth process, into opportunities to build deeper trust and connection with your audience.
And before AI, it was already trendy to put layers between us and the people we help, with automations, and deterrents…
Which is why people who discarded those barriers and just tried to help people outperformed everyone else.
And now, instead of disconnecting from and leaning away from the audience and those they are really creating for, those same people are once again leaning in.
Building Lasting Trust and Why This Matters More Now Than Ever
We’re not in the same culture we were even 1 year ago now.
We’ve gone from an information economy to a gig economy, to a trust economy very, very quickly.
Why?
Artificial Intelligence prompt, rapid image generation and concerns over mandatory identity verification.
Chat GPT broke the record for the fastest-growing user base of all time reaching over 100 million users in just the first two months.
And while this AI app and ones like it are taking off at record-breaking growth trajectories everyone is thinking the same thing, “Soon I’m going to be reading words written by a robot with a picture of a robot, or a video of a robot, and I won’t be able to know the difference.”
Then people will have a choice…
Trust no one, or trust a few people deeply and no one else.
This is going to continue to affect the way we do everything from building businesses, run countries, to making art.
And it’s just beginning.
Trust was already valuable but now it is precious and scarce—and the new gold.
You’ve heard of the real-estate bubble, just wait to see what happens when the trust-bubble pops.
It’s going to be something all creators are going to have to be conscious of, sooner than we expected.
And for the wise, an opportunity to continually focus on leaning in, giving good advice, and creating lasting trust.
Because what has always been an important, grounding force, that keeps companies and creators on track, has become infinitely more important and something that will divide organizations and creators in the future.
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