Too Much Advice, Not Enough Answers

By Tricia Scott.

As I write this, I've closed Instagram for at least the fourth time this morning. In the name of research, obviously. Competitor analysis. Market intelligence. (Nobody in the history of the internet has ever spent forty minutes on Instagram doing market intelligence.)

Here's what I found in there (apart from dancing cats, my favourite).

One woman, amazing lighting, telling me the answer is to do less—radical rest. Protect your energy. The work will find you when you stop chasing it. I saved it.

Then, two seconds later, another woman, this time in a sharp suit, telling me that everyone I admire is out-working me by a factor of at least ten, and if I'm not posting umpteen times daily, testing weekly and shipping something before Wednesday, I've already lost. Also saved.

Two directly opposing instructions. Both delivered with total conviction. Both backed by credentials.

And there it is—that small, familiar drop in your stomach. “I must be doing it wrong. How long will it take me to rewrite all of my sales pages? There's a right answer here, and I've somehow missed it.”

No, there isn't. No, you haven't, and for the love of gin, step away from the sales pages.  Because you know what, they're both right.

The perfectly rested woman is right for her business, her season, her nervous system and her overheads. The ten-times woman is right for hers.

Two correct answers to two completely different questions, and importantly, neither of which was ever yours.

We take the advice and skip the context.

We hear the conclusion and never ask what problem it was solving.

We borrow her strategy without checking whether we have her capacity, cash flow, childcare, health, or team of four (or ten).

We assume that if it worked for her, it should work for us, and when it doesn't, we don't blame the fit.

We blame ourselves.

Listen, advice is a prescription. You can borrow a stranger's glasses and wear them for a week — but when the headache turns up, the honest conclusion is never “my eyes are broken.” They were never your glasses.

Trying to wear all of the ideas and ideologies at once is a bit like taking directions from four sat-navs at the same junction, in a language you don't speak. At the same time, someone in the back seat reads your horoscope out loud (total mare for me, I am literally one foot in Aquarius and one in Pisces).

I wrote something a while ago about the space race — The story goes that NASA spent millions engineering a pen that would write in zero gravity (remember the Fisher space pen?), and the Soviets solved the same problem… with a pencil. Whether this is actually true or not, I really don't know, but its the perfect example of focusing so hard on an issue that they failed to see the easy option - the one that worked for them in that moment. They weren't stupid. They were so deep in the problem they couldn't see the most simple solution.

You've got a pencil too. It's the thing you keep scrolling past because it looks too small to count. 

When it comes to content overload (except in the case of cats, in which case, carry on), the question stops being “who's right?” because every voice on that grid is right about something, and, trust me, the grid will never run out of them. Instead it becomes: what does THIS problem actually need?

Not this industry. Not this niche. This business, this body, this bank balance, this day.

You already know. That's the uncomfortable part. Underneath the forty tabs and the fifty saved reels and the podcast you've half-listened to three times, there is one thing you've been avoiding, and it is almost always smaller (and more boring) than anything you've been collecting.

Send the invoice. Ring her back. Take the afternoon off. Delete the funnel nobody asked for. 

And the sales pages? They're your Fisher Space Pen. Millions in engineering, for a problem a pencil already solved.

 Put it down. 

You are not missing the memo. You are the only woman alive holding the whole picture of your own life — the numbers, the body, the season, the people in it, and you are the only one qualified to answer for it.

You don't have to stop listening. Save the reels. Save the dancing cats (obvs). But when the noise starts and you feel that pull to rebuild something that was working fine — reach for the f*cking pencil.

I believe in you (always),

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 Tricia Scott is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Female CEO — a global platform, magazine, and community dedicated to helping women build confident, aligned, powerful businesses.

A startup mentor and multi-company director, she’s spent the past decade helping women move from overwhelmed and isolated to empowered and intentional.

Most days, she’s juggling her MacBook, her next big idea, and a very necessary caffeine supply. Connect with her at thefemaleceo.com.