With the election of Trump, several of you, my long-time readers and friends, are now in DC to help the administration accomplish its work. In most cases, this means working as a staffer or advisor in some capacity.
As such, your primary role is to give counsel to the “principal,” or boss, in DC-speak. Your job is to solve problems and gain knowledge that your boss needs but doesn’t have, so they can make the best decision possible.
Giving counsel is a useful and powerful skill, not just in politics but also in business and life. It is also very difficult. I have, therefore, decided to put together a handful of lessons I’ve learned in my years of serving as an advisor, being advised, and watching others give and receive advice both well and poorly.
In order to give advice, you first need to figure out what kind of counsel is required of you. The principal will not always communicate this well. You may be tasked with finding out about some broad topic. The person seeking counsel might not be able to tell you exactly what it is they want to know.
It is all too easy to get lost on the open sea of information. The vast concatenation of facts, opinions, and data that make up human life does not admit of easy or obvious interpretation. What is important? What is not? Therefore, the first step to giving advice is to ask yourself: What is the fundamental question I am being asked?
Pare away the extraneous. Cut to the heart of things: what am I supposed to be doing? Why? You must constantly ask this question of yourself. Why am I here? What is my task? Is the task doable? You must do everything in your power to discover the real interests and concerns of your principal. What makes them tick? What is it that they want to know? What do they need to know?
Your job, as an advisor, is to be value-added. You are there to answer their questions and to find answers to questions they didn’t even know they had.
Once you are clear on what is being asked of you, once you grasp the subject upon which you are supposed to give advice, you must ask yourself: What don’t I know? Begin with your ignorance. Begin with the blank space in your own mind. You need to sharply delineate knowledge from guesswork and opinions. The human tendency is towards presumption. It is more common to overestimate your own abilities rather than to undersell them.
Therefore, you must relentlessly expose your own ignorance to yourself. If you are doing your job well, you should constantly feel humbled by how much you still need to learn. To be a good advisor, you must be an inveterate reader on all important subjects. If you are wondering what makes a subject important, simply look around. Start with what other people think is important.
Once you grasp what you don’t know but should know, you should find someone who does know. As an advisor, your job isn’t to know everything but to know as many knowers as possible. Your job is to be an expert on experts. You need to be a master of the science of sciences. In other words, you need to cultivate a powerful bullshit detector.
You need to be able to identify real subject matter experts in subjects in which you are not an expert. The easiest way of doing this is by learning to ask good questions. This is an art in its own right, but here are some helpful guideposts.
First, real experts make the complicated simple. They can explain to a non-expert in clear, concise language what it is that they know and why it matters. Second, they can answer follow-up questions. If you press a real expert with intelligent questions, they will move easily from the simple overview to the complexities of their field smoothly. Finally, real experts can defend themselves from critics.
Struggle and conflict—the dialectical process of mutual combat—is the most efficient way of separating the wheat from the chaff. If someone can hear counterarguments to their technical knowledge and come armed with counterexamples, retorts, and thought-provoking lines of future thought and research, there is a very good chance that they know what they are talking about.
Clear thinking, clear writing, and clear argumentation all go together. A real expert isn’t identified by credentials, educational pedigree, or office held, but by their ability to communicate clearly and logically on a field of knowledge.
Once you have identified the core question, recognized your own ignorance, and found an expert who can rectify it, comes the task of synthesizing this knowledge for use. The reason to give counsel is to help the counselled make a decision.
All advice aims at choice and action.
To make good choices, one must first give an accounting of the options available. One needs to determine profit and loss, pros and cons, and good and bad. To do this well, you first must recognize that every choice involves tradeoffs. They always exist. They must. We are finite beings living in a world of scarce resources. There is no decision that does not involve giving something up.
Before you can decide whether the sacrifice is worth it, you must first give as accurate an account as you can of what choices are involved. Moreover, you must also recognize that because the future is unknowable, every choice involves risk. There are no guarantees. There is no safety. There is no magic.
Everything in life takes thought, hard work, and good luck to be accomplished properly. Precise certainty about future events is not available to us. We must constantly adjust our expectations to changing circumstances.
In order to give a proper accounting of a given choice, the advisor must be brutally, relentlessly honest. Powerful human desires seek to occlude the truth, to tip the scales in favor of our true secret desire. The most powerful human passion is to have our cake and eat it too. But this isn’t available to us. Ever.
As an advisor, you must communicate the choices clearly. You must articulate precisely and succinctly what sacrifices are required to attain a given end. The principal, your boss, does not have time to examine all the alternatives, only the most relevant. It is your job to provide that information quickly and cleanly.
When communicating advice, avoid metaphors. Do not say a thing is “like” something else. Say what it is. Do not use euphemisms. Be blunt. Be harsh. Do not sugar-coat the harsh truth. Do not cover over problems. Face facts honestly.
If your principal cannot hear the truth spoken plainly even after having asked you to do so, then you should simply walk away. The role of the advisor is not to be the decision maker. You are not the principal. You are an assistant and helper. If your help is not needed, go somewhere else where you will be valued and valuable.
Your job, as an advisor, is not to make choices but to clarify the options available. Your job is to consider the best use of scarce resources in order to accomplish definite ends.
There is one exception: at times, your principal may ask for your advice regarding the ends themselves. This is the highest honor an advisor can receive. It is also the most difficult problem you will ever have to face. To probe the “why” question to its depth requires a sternness, discipline, and seriousness of mind that is very rare even in the best circumstances.
By entrusting you with the right to give counsel on the proper ends to be sought, the principal is giving you access to their most important and fundamental power. You have been given the right to speak on the matter of purpose. Do not take that task lightly.
To summarize, in order to give good advice, you must first ask the core question; you must get to the heart of things and clarify the goal to be sought. Next, you must acquire knowledge of your own ignorance. Then you need to find those who do know. You can do this by interrogating their knowledge and, most importantly, seeing how they respond under pressure and when challenged.
Once you have acquired knowledge or access to those who possess it, then you must synthesize this information. You must give a proper accounting of the pros and cons. This requires relentless honesty. Finally, you must clearly communicate the available choices to your principal and then allow them to choose as they see fit.
A good advisor will ultimately be entrusted to speak not only on the employment of means but to the heart of the matter—to the ends themselves.
This process of investigation, accounting, and presentation is the essence of all advice. Those who can do this process well, in my experience, rise quickly to the heights of power, honor, and wealth. They are the most valuable employees, the most trusted friends, and the right-hand men of the great everywhere.
A man who knows how to give good advice can easily rise from the depths of poverty and want to the heights of wealth and prominence. There are few more valuable and important skills than that of knowing how to give good counsel.