Advice is overrated
99.99% of advice is tainted
Why you shouldn’t listen to advice most of the time:
Advice is often just someone disagreeing because you didn’t do it his way.
Feedback is a deeper reflection of the person giving it than the person receiving it.
Advice has the person’s own limitations built it. You might be taking on the limitations of others which you might never have had in the first place.
Advice without skin in the game, when you don’t have to face any downsides, is all too easy to give.
It’s easy to give advice where you can’t use the advice yourself. A billionaire saying money isn’t everything. A beautiful person saying that beauty is on the inside.
Advice based on one’s personal experiences is not representative of reality. It’s just a 0.000000001% slice of reality. Certainly not your reality.
Advice based on their success story that sounds too good to be true, usually is. People cherry-pick only the dots they want to connect, not the dots interplaying within the real-world situation they were in. You’ll be a victim of their own narrative-fixing if you followed their story.
Advice is like yesterday’s lottery ticket number. It’s like trying to win the lottery by buying the same winning number from yesterday. It worked yesterday, but it might not work today. Almost all advice is contextual to the time, place and a network of factors interplaying to produce the result. Even luck. We like to think we had a hand in it, but really, no one’s any smarter.
A better way to advise?
Create skin in the game for yourself in their success, if you want to give them advice.
Critique by creating an alternative yourself.
This isn’t about you. Ask questions about the person. Have empathy, take their perspective as your own. Don’t add anything from yourself.
“When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.” ~ Baltasar Gracian
Given what I just said, why should anyone take advice about advice-giving?
No. Try it out yourself and use what works, for you.
But of course, you can just ignore this advice.