Getting good at getting advice
Founders get a lot of advice.
From investors, from friends, from advisors, from family, from experts, from peers, from books, from everywhere.
And yet, often founders feel like they're all alone with no quality feedback.
How does this happen?
It’s this:
Most people are terrible at giving advice.
But I've noticed a trend in successful founders I work with:
They are excellent at following good advice.
In fact, it may be one of the most valuable skills I see in founders.
VCs often call this “coachability,” but I don’t think that description gives the skill enough credit.
It’s more like they have the ear, the flexibility, and the discipline to:
Understand what advice is worth following
Change their behavior to absorb the feedback
Stick with it long enough to see the results
If you want to get better at taking advice, here’s the process I see them use:
Discern
Good advice comes from causal soundness, real data in the world, and relevance to your circumstances.
For example: “Never take VC investment – it’s a poison pill” is potentially terrible advice. Especially if:
They themselves were a single founder who took VC investment one time but things didn’t work (one anecdotal experience with questionable causality
They can’t surface real, published data on statistically better founder outcomes from profit‑driven businesses
The ways in which it was terrible for them might be wonderful for you (if you perform better under observation and pressure, active investors are a godsend!)
Change
Once you’ve decided the advice is worth taking, you can’t just nod and say “good point.”
You have to break the inertia and move.
That means taking what you’ve heard and translating it into real, concrete next steps — not someday, but now.
Update the plan. Change the priorities. Assign ownership. Tell people what’s different starting today.
And then you put your decision out there — for your team, for your investors, for your customers — and say we’re going this way now.
That’s uncomfortable. It’s vulnerable. Because if you’re wrong, you’ve not only wasted time, you’ve steered the whole company in the wrong direction.
It takes guts to do that.
And it takes even more effort to get your whole team moving in the new direction — to retrain habits, shift priorities, maybe throw away months of work.
That’s why you can’t do it every time some “smart person” has a suggestion.
You have to pick your moments.
And when you do pick, you have to be all‑in.
Stick
Good advice doesn’t prove itself in a week.
You have to run it long enough to really see how it applies to you and your business.
That means being structured about it.
Define the change. Decide what success looks like. Track the right signals.
And then — this is the hard part — be honest with yourself about the output.
If the numbers don’t move, or they move in the wrong direction, don’t spin it into a win just because you’ve already invested in the change.
If it is working, don’t pull the plug just because it feels uncomfortable or takes longer than you’d like.
The best founders I know don’t just “try things.”
They commit, they measure, and they adapt with their eyes open.
Get better at taking advice
And your whole business
Will get better.
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