On a study that asked whether the best performers give the best advice, and found that learners cannot tell the difference. They just think they can.
Every piece of mentoring advice ever written, including some that should know better, tells you to aim high. Find the person who has done what you want to do, and done it brilliantly. Then ask them how.
It sounds so obviously right that almost nobody checks it. Why would you? If you wanted to learn to paint, you would not take lessons from someone who paints badly.
In 2022, three psychologists at Harvard and the University of Virginia checked it anyway.
Longer is not better. It just feels that way
David Levari, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson ran four studies using simple skill tasks, from word puzzles to throwing darts. In one, a hundred "advisers" played several rounds of a word-scramble game, wrote tips for future players, and rated how good they thought their own tips were. Around two thousand new players then received advice from one of those advisers, or no advice at all.
The advice helped. People who received it improved, and kept improving round after round. So far, so reassuring.
Then came the awkward part. Advice from the top performers was, on average, no more useful than advice from everyone else. The top performers were convinced theirs was the best. The people receiving it agreed, and rated it as more helpful. They did this without knowing anything about who had written it.
So what were they responding to? Volume. The best performers wrote more advice. Readers saw more words, assumed more wisdom, and mistook quantity for quality.
Why the stars make patchy tutors
The researchers offer a sensible explanation. Doing something well and explaining it well are separate skills. Once a skill becomes second nature, the expert stops noticing the small things that make it work. A natural hitter who has swung a bat every day since childhood may never think to mention grip or balance, because for them those problems were solved decades ago.
Now carry that into an office. Your senior mentor's career story has been told many times, and every retelling has sanded it smoother. The false starts shrink. The lucky breaks become judgment. What arrives in your mentoring session is a confident, detailed account of how they got here, delivered by someone who no longer remembers what it felt like to be where you are. It will sound excellent. That is rather the problem.
A fair caveat. These were lab tasks, and the authors are careful to say their findings hold in at least some domains. Nobody has yet run the experiment on vice presidents. But the mechanism is not exotic, and anyone who has sat through a forty-minute answer to a five-minute question will recognize it.
What to do differently
Judge the advice, not the adviser. After each conversation, ask yourself whether you could act on what you heard by Monday. If you cannot, it does not matter who said it.
Distrust the length of an answer. More detail feels like more value. The study suggests it often isn't. When your mentor has finished, ask them to name the single thing they would do in your position. The shorter answer is usually the useful one.
Take them back to the beginning. Ask what they got wrong in their first two years, or what they wish someone had told them then. It pulls them out of expert mode and back towards the version of themselves who faced your problem.
Look a few rungs up, not at the summit. Someone a few years ahead of you has solved your current problem recently enough to remember how.
Watch your own bias. You will rate advice more highly because it came from someone impressive. So did two thousand people who did not even know who was advising them.
The awkward conclusion
The best performers are not misleading you. They simply can no longer see what they do. That leaves the mentee with a slightly unfair job: being the person in the room who still remembers what it is like not to know, and steering the conversation accordingly.
In Chapter 4 of The Accidental Mentee, this is the first of four matching errors: choosing the most senior person who said yes. A leader four levels above you has certainly been where you are. They have also forgotten most of what it felt like, and their memory of being three years into a career may be thirty years old. Mentees tend to get more practical value from someone two or three steps ahead. A relationship run entirely at six steps' distance produces good speeches and few useful Tuesdays.
Its close cousin is matching on charisma. Fluency, certainty and good stories make advice feel useful before anyone has tested it, and people rate confident advisers as more competent than hesitant ones, even when the hesitant one is right. The Levari study adds a third disguise, which is sheer volume. The book's remedy is a single sheet of paper, the Fit Scorecard. It compares candidates on relevance of experience, working style and willingness to invest, and makes you write down which error you are most likely to commit with each of them. Prestige predicts how your mentoring relationship sounds when you describe it to friends. Fit predicts what happens when the door closes.
By all means ask the champion for advice. Just don't measure it with a ruler.
Source
David E. Levari, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson, "Tips from the Top: Do the Best Performers Really Give the Best Advice?" Psychological Science 33, no. 5 (2022): 685–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211054089.
Background: Association for Psychological Science summary (July 2022).
