You Don’t Need My Advice
Advice.
There’s advice everywhere. You can’t move for all the advice being dispensed. Some of it is good advice, but a lot of it is bad. The trouble is that it falls to you to tell which is which.
People want to give out their advice and become your trusted advisor, but trust is built, ideally. Not granted. You only become a trusted advisor when your advice delivered on its promise repeatedly. If you trust in advice before that trust is justified and earned, very bad things can happen to you. And they do.
Not that you’d take my advice or anybody else’s anyway. People are stubborn like that. You’re stubborn too. Nobody likes to take advice. Understandably, that’s because so much advice is, it seems, very bad advice and it looks indistinguishable from good advice. Only it isn’t.
Everybody thinks they’ll figure it all out for themselves. Sometimes they do. Often times, they don’t. The point is that advice is, at best, a suggestion. It’s a mere inspiration or warning, for or against a course of action you’re going to decide on yourself anyway, based on your own context and prejudices.
There’s so much advice that people give out which they don’t follow themselves. It’s written as a confessional outpouring to themselves, about things they think they ought to do better, but don’t. Knowing that, maybe you shouldn’t value that advice as highly. Not that you do. Why would you?
Advice is often so hopelessly generalised that it can’t possibly apply to every situation, as if there’s a magic, undiscovered, universal rule that you just need to follow for everything to turn out fine. Life’s not like that.
At other times, advice is so specialised to a single instance and circumstance, that it can’t possibly work for anybody else. Even if you did exactly what Elon Musk did, blow for blow, step by step, it doesn’t mean you’ll be a trillionaire.
Advice is only worth what you pay for it, if it’s free. If you pay more than that, whether or not it is worth anything depends. I retained some high priced lawyers, once, whose advice was worthless, but not free. Occasionally, the advice you pay for saves you a fortune, or makes you a fortune. You just never know.
There’s an entire advice-industrial complex that has grown up. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry. But they can’t all be right. For every piece of advice, you can always find and equal and opposite piece of counter-advice. I think that should be named as a law, after me, actually.
So my advice is to be wary of advice. Will you take my advice, though?
