Ask for stories, not advice

How to get useful lessons from an expert

It’s always a treat to meet someone you admire. But if you’ve ever gotten a chance to ask a top expert in your field for advice, you know that it can sometimes be a frustrating experience. People often can’t articulate exactly how they do what they do. They skip steps in the retelling. Or they resort to platitudes (“just write what you know”). Not everyone is a skilled teacher!

I was reminded of this while reading Scott H. Young’s new book, Get Better at Anything. Young definitely recommends talking with experts. But he points out that the sheer nature of being an expert is that what seems obvious to you isn’t obvious to everyone else.

So, rather than ask for advice, ask for stories. People may not be able to articulate exactly how they do what they do. But they can tell you what they did. And that might be just as helpful.

How did you handle that?

One approach might be to ask your expert to recount a particularly challenging incident. “Telling stories focuses on the concrete details of when decisions occurred, how they were made, and what their consequences were, in ways that asking for generic advice or routines often omits,” Young says.

Young suggests that “A good protocol is to act like a journalist preparing for a story — focus on gathering facts, establishing a timeline, and walking through the decisions step-by-step. This provides the raw material for asking follow-up questions to investigate why the expert made certain choices. A focus on the facts tends to highlight details of a story that may be obscured when simply asking for the broader lessons from the experience.”

Spinning a yarn

The good news is that people in general like to tell stories about themselves, especially when prompted. So go ahead and ask: Tell me how you planned that recovery mission, or landed that plane, or did that tricky surgery, or made that scientific discovery. What was happening that day? Who was with you? What did you guys do first? And so on.

To be sure, life doesn’t always happen in story format (natural building of tension, epiphany, resolution). So stories aren’t always the whole truth, either. But while an expert might not always know what’s helpful for your situation, they do know what they personally did in a situation. Then you can pick the appropriate lessons from that to help you get better at whatever it is you do.