If you’ve been a CEO for almost any length of time or any appointed or elected leader, you know that there is no shortage of people willing to offer you advice. When it comes to making critical decisions or solving tough problems, you may want or even need others’ input to help guide your thinking.  You soon find that you have a nearly endless supply of both solicited and unsolicited advice coming from confidants, family members, and friends – and a host of professional advisors who provide their expertise for a living. How do you choose what advice to accept or even whether you should accept any at all?

The challenge is sorting the information you receive. You have sources you can trust and others you cannot. And then you have to determine what is and isn’t useful or valuable. There are times when even good advice isn’t particularly helpful.

The problem with advice is choosing what to take and then how to best act on it.

When you face tough decisions, you often find yourself most in need of sound advice, yet what you are apt to receive in those moments just provides another layer of decision-making that may further serve to complicate your task. More often than not, when you find yourself looking for hard answers, what you are better questions. And finding better questions is a matter of gaining perspective.

In a recent piece in INC magazine, Warren Buffet identified the need for perspective as an “often ignored trait that separates successful leaders from all others.” You need to be able to see what isn’t obvious to you and even consider things you find to be disagreeable. Perspective is what allows you to see your own weaknesses and vulnerabilities and become aware of the unconscious bias that tends to limit your thinking, your options, and your potential. Unlike advice, keen perspective is more-often in short supply. And to make matters worse, you must cultivate it before you find yourself in need of it.

The greatest source of perspective is your own experience.

Reflecting on your past successes and failures will inform many of the decisions you will make going forward. But what happens when you face something entirely unfamiliar? Or where what worked in the past doesn’t work now? You can gain perspective from reading books or otherwise formally educating yourself. But who’s to say whether what you learn will be relevant to the challenges you are facing?

A good mentor might be able to coach you. And to be effective, they need to reflect on their personal experience to help guide you with relevant questions. Perspective is only gained through curiosity – which informs the quality of the questions you pose. You find better answers when you can ask better questions. To find the answers you need – you start by questioning what you need that you do not have or need to know that you do not know.

If you are lucky enough to have found a coach or mentor who can be your muse and help you conjure the answers you need, you might be living in rarefied air. Such people are tough to find. There are plenty of successful people you might turn to, but being successful at what you do does not ensure that you can help others do the same. It is likely you can learn something – but far from certain, you will replicate their success.

A far better way is to seek perspective from many voices. Benjamin Franklin relied on this approach to create prosperity with his own businesses while helping others also succeed. He called this cohort of business leaders he convened his Junta. They met regularly to exchange information and insight – and to challenge each other’s thinking. And today, there are plenty of modern-day Juntas to choose from.

While the foundation of such gatherings being the resources and commitment of the members remains mostly the same, technology enables contemporary cohorts to expand the diversity of experience by allowing people to gather more quickly, easily, and more frequently and expand the geographic reach to provide broader perspectives.

Sure, you may find that you also get good advice from a group of trusted peers, but you will quickly learn that nothing compares to the value of having your answers questioned and your perspective widened. Unlike management, which can be considered science, leadership is an art, meaning you must rely on your gut and allow your feelings to guide your actions, including what advice to act on. You can be the smartest person in the room, or even smart enough to surround yourself with people smarter than you are, but without the benefit of the clarity that only perspective can provide, what you now may never get you where you are going.

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