Sometimes the most useful advice someone can give you isn't advice at all - it's a question which makes you think differently about something you already know. But other people aren't the only ones who can ask you questions - you can also question yourself!

Often when asking for 'advice', we think what we want is someone else's opinion on a matter. But often this isn't that useful - because we don't know what assumptions and thought processes led to that judgement. In particular, it can make things tricky if you get very different opinions from different people. Instead, I think it's more helpful to explicitly ask people for help with structuring a decision/problem, or to point out useful considerations or pieces of information that you might be missing.

A lot of people say they find writing hard. But what exactly makes writing so difficult? Just putting random words on paper is easy. What’s difficult is turning those words into sentences that really express the ideas you’re trying to convey.