Hey folks, I'm Swati.
Welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
This newsletter is those conversations: what I'm seeing, thinking, and what I'd tell you if we were grabbing coffee.
This week's edition is about taking advice.
But before that:
When you make a big career decision, who do you turn to first?
While exploring options after graduating from IIT Delhi, I had a chance to get into IIM Bangalore.
My family and several seniors I'd spoken to were saying the same thing: go.
But one senior I respected a lot told me not to, and I listened to her.
Looking back, I realized that the seniors pushing IIM-B were all IIM alumni.
The one who had gone to Harvard for her MBA didn't push it and the one who went straight to McKinsey didn't push it either.
I had all the voices I needed.
When I was tilting towards IIM, I realised that I was weighing heavily one person's authority (e.g. a professor or my parents), without examining whether their reasoning for that specific decision applied to my situation.
And I see this often.
A few years ago, my father sat me down and explained how he'd built his career.
He came from a place of good intention based on his experience.
He told me to stay loyal to one organization, build steadily within a structure, and let tenure do the talking.
The career landscape he navigated in (stable long tenures, hierarchical progression, loyalty repaid with security) has shifted considerably since then.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics put median job tenure at 3.9 years in 2024, the lowest in two decades.
My father’s advice was built on a world he knew well, one that had already shifted by the time I was making those decisions.
People advising you aren't being careless.
Their brain finds a match from their own experience and stops searching.
That's how expertise works but the problem is when the match no longer fits the world you're in.
Most people treat advice the way I treated inputs about IIM-B decision.
They find one source they trust, weigh it disproportionately, and stop there.
When I ask students who they spoke to, it's always the people who have made that choice without knowing what the other side is.
They got one perspective five times and mistook the repetition for consensus.
And when advice does come from varied sources, people tend to discard whatever cuts against what they already lean toward.
The input that confirms the existing instinct feels like validation, and the one that contradicts it feels like the person doesn't understand the situation.
The research shows why averaging works better than choosing but most people never get there.
They pick one voice, commit to it, and move on.
And the voice they tend to give the most weight to is usually the most confident one, which turns out to be the one least likely to have considered alternatives.
So the advice you receive from your most trusted senior is often the advice least likely to account for possibilities they haven't considered.
There's also a cost to the decision you didn't really own.
When a choice you deferred to someone else turns out badly, the regret is heavier, because the regret belongs to a decision that was never fully yours
A few things I'd do differently.
A senior who navigated your industry ten years ago has a different vantage point from someone who made a similar move last year.
Someone who stayed in India sees things differently from someone who relocated, and a corporate lifer weighs tradeoffs differently from someone who built something from scratch.
The goal is to hold your own judgment against enough different frames that you can see where it holds and where it doesn't.
Most career advice is survivorship testimony.
The person giving it followed a particular path, it worked for them, and they're reporting what worked, which may or may not apply to your context right now.
Before you act on advice, ask: When was this formed? What was the market like when this person made their choices? Does the underlying logic hold in 2025, or does it depend on conditions that no longer exist?
Advice built on the old model can sound completely sensible and still be wrong for today.
When you disagree with someone you respect, there's a pull toward finding permission.
You want to locate someone who agrees so the responsibility feels distributed.
The problem is that a decision made to satisfy other people's approval rather than your own judgment leaves you without the psychological ownership that makes you commit to it and work through the hard parts.
If you've gathered the input, evaluated what each perspective is assuming, and still landed somewhere different from what the people around you recommended, that decision is yours to make and yours to live with.
A good relationship survives a career disagreement.
Just remember, your career is yours to build and the advice you receive is one of many inputs.
Hit reply: what's the best piece of career advice you've ever ignored, and were you right?
I read every email.
Swati