 I had a really interesting call with somebody recently and it really got me thinking about how amazing and inspirational internet advice can be or how terrible and life-destroying internet advice can be. Now in this video I want to share why I think most internet advice is complete BS as well as what I would use as a system for knowing is this advice going to help me or is this going to make my life much, much harder. What's up you guys? I'm the design author of the book Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in their 20s to check it out on Amazon or on Audible. Now let's talk about this idea of internet advice. You've probably heard the saying, opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one. Now on this coaching session with somebody we were having a really really really important problem that kept coming up because he was saying that he was consuming people's advice on the internet and he was getting very different advice and sometimes he would do one piece of advice and it wouldn't work and then he would try the other piece of advice and sometimes it would or sometimes it wouldn't work. Now in this particular discussion he was saying he was trying to figure out his career and the two people whose advice he was taking were Gary Vaynerchuk and David Goggins. So you know you go over to the Gary Vaynerchuk side and Gary Vaynerchuk is like do what you absolutely love do your passion like settle for the pay cut definitely do not go into anything for the money and he goes on more. And then you go to the David Goggins side and David Goggins is like I want you to be the hardest son of a bitch there ever existed on earth do what's hard do what's difficult do the things that suck become a hard person. So here you have two people who are very successful and first of all they're only successful maybe in one part of life if you knew their whole life you may not admire them so much or respect them. But anyway you have two successful people Gary V says follow your heart do what you love. David Goggins says do what's hard do what's difficult become the hardest person you know and you're all jacked up and inspired after listening to his audio book but how do you reconcile these two pieces of advice? You have advice that says do what you love you advice that says don't do what you love do what's hard so what do you do with this advice here? If I were you in this era I would go about treating people's advice like treating and dealing with a scientific hypothesis you know let's say for example your goal is to get fit this year and you have to learn more about nutrition and diet. So you're going to see this problem firsthand because you're going to go into Google what diet to lose weight and you're going to get punched in the face by search results that range from the emaciated raw vegan woman to the 300 grams of protein bodybuilder bro Chad and both of them are going to be giving nutrition advice both can probably help you to some degree and in between you're going to have paleo you're going to have a Mediterranean you're going to have something else in between so how do you really know what to do in my opinion you treat each one like a scientific hypothesis so for 30 days I'm going to try this advice and I'm going to evaluate it based on two key metrics number one was did it work to get the results I wanted number two was did it make me feel good internally because both of those are needed to continue doing something long-term so let's say you're dealing with Gary V versus David Goggins advice what are you trying to do are you trying to be more successful in your career you trying to be more disciplined about your diet or disciplined in life so do an actual 30 day experiment and journal the whole thing I tried living like Goggins for 30 days I tried living like Gary V for 30 days what happened did you do more workouts but you felt crappier because you were always doing things you hated if you did the Gary V thing did you do work you loved but you didn't make any more money and you're still a starving artist right treat each one as a 30 day or a 100 day hypothesis and test it out to see if the advice helps you because I think internet advice can be one of the most damaging things and you probably don't know this but I don't consume any YouTube content I don't consume much social media deliberately so I can focus on improving my life and trying my best to create original content if that's at all possible so it's a challenging era with internet advice because I grew up without any internet I was 12 before the internet even existed social media like Facebook didn't even come out till I was in college and YouTube till after that so there was no distraction like this both in the good way and in the bad way just didn't exist so you have to be careful now to curate the material that goes in your brain the sheer volume as well as what they're saying I hope that helps you guys it's a difficult time but also an awesome time to be alive this book is my best advice on how to stay focused in your 20s or 30s everything I wish I knew I put in here specifically for that purpose alright guys so before you go check out the two related videos on this topic also related to trying to figure out what to do with your life or how to best use advice to improve your life