Some non-advice advice

Post type: Loose reflection.
Certainty: Reasonably sure.

I get a lot of messages on LinkedIn from young students and graduates. They’ll share a templated note, attach a resume, and ask for a job. When I tell them we’re not hiring, they pivot: “Can you give me some advice then?”

And every time, I freeze up. Because I can’t think of a more uncomfortable thing in life than being asked to give someone advice.

Think about what you need to give good advice. You need to understand the person—their present situation, their trajectory, their abilities, their personality. If that’s what’s required, and I think it is, then giving advice is inherently an arrogant act. You’re making a whole lot of assumptions about someone you barely know. And yet, the ease with which people dispense advice never ceases to amaze me. I mean, the fact that we talk out of our asses for the vast majority of our time shouldn’t be shocking, but it is to me. In a lot of cases, I keep reminding myself of the famous thing Aristotle said: “When in doubt, shut the fuck up.” He didn’t actually say it, but I like to think he would have.

There’s another problem: it’s very easy to confuse luck for skill and correlation for causation. Just because you reached some stage of life or ended up in a particular job doesn’t automatically make you an expert on how to get there. Life is chaotic—far more chaotic than we’d like to think. Thanks to our brains’ penchant for finding patterns where there are none and coherence where there isn’t any, we tell ourselves stories about why things happened. We fall into the delusion that we “did something” and it worked because of our ability. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not immune to this. I’m prey to the same human foibles as anyone else.

So here’s my compromise: instead of giving you advice, let me tell you what I’d do differently if I were 25 today.

If I were a recent graduate looking for work, here’s what I’d notice: everyone is playing the same game. Cold LinkedIn messages. Mass-emailed resumes. Templated cover letters. There are now AI tools specifically designed to blast your resume to hundreds of companies. Tools to help you game interviews. Tools to generate polished-looking resumes filled with fluff. Which means if I do the same thing everyone else is doing, I’m competing at the exact same starting point regardless of my actual capabilities. That seems like a waste of time.

So here’s what I’d do instead: I’d let my work speak for itself. It could be starting a blog and writing about things I’m learning. It could be writing summaries of the books I’m reading. We’re living in 2025 where for $20 a month, you get access to some of the best coding assistants on the planet—which means as long as you have an idea and can articulate it in plain English, you can build pretty much anything reasonable and put it out there for the world to see. Small tools. Little websites that solve real problems. Things that have utility. This seems like the bare minimum to stand out in a sea of sameness.

I’d also be relentlessly curious. Selfish, even, in discovering and learning new things. Just blindly tumbling down a million rabbit holes. This is me speaking in hindsight after 10 years: every single good thing that has happened to me is downstream of going down some random rabbit hole I had no business exploring.

And most importantly: when in doubt, I’d just do things. I keep saying this to friends because it seems true. Doing things creates momentum, and momentum creates more momentum. The only way to end up in places you couldn’t have imagined is to do things, show things, and let your effort speak louder than your resume. You’re young. No one expects the most polished work or the “best” thing. But curiosity and effort will open more doors than a templated LinkedIn message ever will.

You can just do things. You can fuck around and find out, and you let the world see all this. In my experience, this always leads to weird and wonderful things like new acquaintances, amazing conversations, collaborations, and so on. For half my life, I had no access to the internet and I’m kinda jealous of this generation. For all its flaws, the internet is amazingly cool. I call it a serendipity machine. The fact that there’s so much cool stuff on the internet and much of it is free boggles my mind. But instead of using the internet to do weird things and go tumbling down wonderful rabbit holes, we’re using it to do brain rot shit—not that you shouldn’t consume brain rot stuff, but there should be balance in everything.

All the fun things that have happened to me have been downstream of my writing on the internet and building and sharing things. This year alone, thanks to AI coding tools, I feel like a kid in a candy store. They’ve been helping me build all the things I wanted to do for a long time and I am having more fun than ever.

Here’s the thing: if I’m a graduate today, my competition isn’t really another graduate or another human being. It’s a $20 AI subscription. If I can’t do more or be more than an AI agent, what real advantage do I have? The answer, I think, is in the things AI can’t do—or at least can’t do well yet. Going down rabbit holes because something seems interesting, not because it’s optimal. Building things that are weird or personal or oddly specific. Writing in a way that sounds like an actual human being with a perspective.

Having a portfolio of interests—things you’ve made, things you’ve learned, things you’ve thought about deeply—that’s what helps you stand out. And the common thread in all of this is reading. At least in my experience, everything good in my career has been downstream of reading and learning new things. I don’t know what happens to reading in the age of large language models—they’re getting better—but as things stand today, reading is still a phenomenally useful thing to do.

So what would I tell my 25-year-old self? Not much, honestly. Because advice is arrogant, and I’d probably ignore it anyway. But if I had to say something, it would be this: don’t do what everyone else is doing. Don’t send the same resume to the same companies in the same way. Do things. Make things. Learn things. Let your curiosity lead, and let your work speak. And when in doubt? Just do something.

That’s not advice. That’s just what I’d do being the deeply awkward person that I am.