On Getting Asked for “Old-School Advice”

When Good Housekeeping Magazine contacted me to request an interview for an article about old-school advice, I felt flattered and honored and, yes, a little surprised that I’d reached an age at which people came to me for “old-school advice.”

I even told the reporter at one point in our back-and-forth that I didn’t know if I had any self-generated old-school advice, as I’m “not that old.”

Turns out she reached out to me as a result of my comments in different blog posts here on Observing Leslie and on my few social media profiles about how this blog makes me “old school.” After all, few people seem to have blogs these days. The blogs that do still exist serve corporations as sales-and-marketing engines or are run by people who monetize them by covering subjects in exchange for payment or free goodies, selling advertising space, or allowing advertisers to post content that looks like regular posts in exchange for a fee.

Unlike those blogs, my blog is purely a hobby, an outlet for my thoughts an observations and my attempt to communicate with the wider world out there—like the blogs of yore. (“Yore” referencing the early days of blogging, the ancient—gulp—1990s). I don’t accept payment or free goodies for my content, I don’t accept advertising, and I cover whatever I want, whenever I want, and however I want. That makes this blog, in today’s day and age, pretty old-school.

The reporter and I chatted back and forth a bit over her several really interesting questions about the “old-school advice” topic, though I really didn’t know if the article would see the light of day until I saw it post live on the Good Housekeeping website with the title “Best Old-School Advice That Still Works.”

If you read the article, you’ll see a mention as to why I moved to Switzerland up front-and-center, and I don’t really know where the reporter got her answer. Pure assumption, perhaps. For the real reason, you can read my post about how Switzerland happened to me.

It’s always fun to see what from an interview gets play on the page, in the actual published article. Most of the meatier tidbits from our conversations do show up, at least in their macro senses.

One exchange with the reporter that didn’t make it into the article and that I really liked was about whether I had an old-school rule about work ethic or craftsmanship that I still lived by. I struggled with how to answer this one beyond my firm belief that anything worth doing is worth doing well, which felt too pat and a little too obvious. (Though sometimes, when I look around, I wonder if it’s as obvious as I think it is.)

I thought about the question and my response for quite a while before I responded with an expansion on that “done well” idea. Here’s what I wrote to the reporter in my e-mail:

Good, quality, worthwhile work takes time. I can’t think of an exception.

There’s a classic story about the painter James McNeil Whistler. During court testimony, a lawyer asked him how he could set such a high price for a piece he had created in two days. Whistler replied, “I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.”

In addition to my blog (and my professional life), I write fiction. I come to the page every day and struggle mightily to tell stories in compelling ways. Even with my blog, I come up with every idea for every post, I do all the research myself, and I write every word. I do all of this without taking shortcuts, including AI assistance of any kind, basic or generative. And yes, that includes AI search results offered by web engines. (I’ve turned that feature off.)

Could I do my writing work, both my fiction and my blog posts, faster by cobbling together quick takes without the research component or by asking an AI engine to come up with ideas for me or to draft the posts or the stories? No question.

But I would never. I’d cheat myself out of what I gain from the effort. I’m a different person based on what I’ve learned, both from the information I’ve gathered and considered and the struggle I undertake over and over again to clearly communicate those learnings and my thinking. I’ve explored subjects in depth, I’ve seen complex issues from multiple angles and in ways I never would have otherwise, and I’ve written myself into corners of my own opinions and changed my own mind several times.

The reporter and I chatted back and forth a bit as well as to why people might seek out old-school advice and old-school things these days. I can see so many possible answers to that query. My best guess, though, or at least the one I think applies most broadly to most people in most situations, is that we live in a world full of hot takes and fads, and they all move and change at the speed of light. More than ever before, with everything so in flux, we crave what has stood the test of time.