My Advice: Pace Yourself
Giving advice is a tricky act. I try to avoid it as often as I can, and as often as I feel the words start to formulate in my head. Nope. Stop it.
Giving feedback is a different deal. That takes skill and practice, especially in order to keep it from coming off as advice or even a mandate. In the role of a teacher, it’s pretty easy to tell students what to do. In some cases maybe that’s okay, but very often when students are driving their own work and discovery, advice couched in feedback is counter-productive.
I recently had the opportunity to explicitly give advice, putting a piece of advice out there into the world to anyone listening. Zak Rosen invited me to contribute to his podcast, The Best Advice Show — an excellent thread of curiosity structured from short, singular pieces of advice from people of all walks of life. Each bit is more like a new tool to try on for yourself instead of a point about something wrong right now. On this occasion it felt fun and useful to offer up something, unlike a typical trap of telling someone what they should be doing.
My advice: pace yourself. (Here’s the episode.) That’s a paraphrasing of measuring and remembering what your calibrated “pace” is. That is, the length of a single stride that you can routinely and…
