How to GET more useful advice and feedback

Steps to take to learn from others

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One of the most energizing parts about working on Next Play is getting to meet (and hopefully help!) so many people.

We now receive dozens of emails a week from a wide range of people asking for some sort of help in navigating what’s next. This includes job-seekers looking for connections to startups, future founders looking to get paired with a co-founder, hiring managers looking to meet candidates, and more.

We (genuinely!) want to be as useful to as many people as possible. The problem is that a big portion of the inbound we receive is simply…hard?…to respond to.

Hard in the sense that I don’t often understand what people are asking. The questions are vague. The emails are long. We read every single email, but sometimes it’s just hard to give a useful response.

(By the way, you can email us hi@nextplay.so and we’ll respond)

I think it’s because a lot of people, and this will sound a bit blunt, are just not very good at asking for advice.

I do not necessarily blame you…it’s not the sort of thing they really teach in school. But I do think it’s a skill you can learn.

You should want to improve because a) you’re wasting your time and b) you could be learning a lot more, a lot more quickly.

The good news, at least I believe, is that you can improve fast. I think you could drastically improve your ability to receive advice (about careers, about products, etc.) in the next thirty minutes. That’s my hope, at least, that by the end of this essay, you’re materially better at getting advice.

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As mentioned, a lot of people ask pretty nonsense questions but maintain hope that these will lead to useful outcomes. It’s common to see someone ask a pretty generic high-level question, and then be surprised when a) people aren’t that interested in answering and b) the answers they do receive aren’t exactly that useful.

Here’s a scenario to illustrate the point:

Question-asker: “Hey what should I work on?”

Advice-giver: “Uhhh well I know literally nothing about you or your aims or goals so let me spin my wheels trying to figure that out over 6 messages in order to then actually be helpful.”

Here’s another:

Question-asker: “Hey can we meet?”

Advice-giver: “Hmm…let’s spend the next 10 emails figuring out why you actually want to meet.”

There’s a bunch more examples of this but you probably get what’s going on. It’s not to say these people have any bad intentions, more just that this is pretty ineffective.

If any of this resonates with you, chances are one of two things may be happening:

1. You’re being indirect

2. You still need to process what you actually want.

If it’s the former (being indirect), my only advice is to consider being more direct. Maintain professionalism, but make it easier for others to help you by stating more directly what you want.

Maybe this is a bias but indirect communication is often inefficient and unproductive…contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to “play the game” in order to succeed. You may think you need to but I don’t think it’s true.

You can say more directly what you are looking for, especially when others have expressed that they are open to trying to help. And people will actually appreciate that!

If it’s the latter—you needing to process your thoughts—the first step is to figure out what you actually want.

There’s a bit of an ironic loop going on, as you may be emailing someone to help you figure out what you want.

The reality, though, is that talking to other people is only one way to get help in figuring out what you want.

One way to better understand what you want may be in talking to other people. But I think it’s often a pretty slow and inefficient path, especially when you come in with no specific aims and just lead with general questions.

Also think about the other person for a moment - are they really signing up to listen to you think through your unprocessed messy ideas? I mean they could, and some people like doing that (like therapists or maybe some of your friends), but in general it’s not a great way to GET actionable, useful advice.

More times than not what happens is you hop on a call and the other person just delivers a monologue giving unsolicited advice that does not really apply to your situation or capture the nuance of your life. Or they don’t respond.

Now I’m not against emailing people, or asking for things, I just think there’s a more productive way to do it. I’ll go into detail now with how to do that.

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Practical method for getting better advice and feedback from other

1. Understand for yourself why you’re asking for help.

   1. Do the work internally to figure out what you actually want. Even if you want someone else to help you figure out what that is more precisely, work on it at some level of detail. Don’t expect others to be able to figure out your life for you and create a bunch of work for them. Instead, do what you can internally.

   2. By the way I think it’s totally reasonable to have a fuzzy desire to connect with others. You may just want to get to know them. You may just want to connect and see where serendipity takes you. Those are reasonable intentions of course!

2. Look for the right person.

   1. Once you know what you want, think about who can help you. Read on the internet for the best people in the world at whatever it is you are looking for. This is not an easy step and a lot of people glaze over this. They think just asking anyone for help will be helpful, but often the person you ask makes a huge difference.

3. Do your research.

   1. See if you can get what you want without needing to actually talk to the person. There’s a chance they’ve already written about the topic or been on a podcast about it.

4. Make your asks extremely clear.

   1. If you do decide to reach out to someone, I would suggest making your ask very clear and specific. People do want to help. But it’s hard to respond to something very general. Being specific makes things a lot clearer and easire to respond to quickly. Try it out, you’ll notice that more people respond to you.

5. Share your motivation.

   1. Don’t just explain what you want but also why. Even if it’s something fuzzy, like wanting to connect and get coffee. You could explain why you want to do so. This’ll help them share their answer.

6. Set the other person up for success.

   1. Share the relevant context and information they need to be able to make a useful contribution without needing lots of clarification and back and forth. Try to pre-answer any of their questions they may have.

   2. Do not put the other person in an uncomfortable position, or a position where you’re asking them to gossip negatively about other people or associate with others in a way they do not want to.

7. Reduce the cost needed for someone else to help you.

   1. If you’re asking them to email someone on your behalf or make a connection for you, send them a forward-able email that makes it really easy to actually help you.

Let me be clear, I think connecting with other people can be extremely helpful. You should join our Slack!

But doing it the wrong way can be really ineffective, so I encourage you to experiment with methods to find what works best for you and your situation.