A perspective about giving and receiving advice.

Ah, the art of advising.

Life is something you cannot predict. In fact, picture this: you are driving a car during a heavy rain on a long road. There’s no going back and you can only move forward. This highway has multiple routes too and you are faced with a dilemma at each junction as to which path you should take. Not to mention each route has it’s own obstacles which you cannot really determine immediately because of the heavy rain obstructing your vision.

So naturally, one of your tendencies will be to call up a person who has traveled down a road further than you have and seek tips from others regarding the route you want to take and the challenges you will face on the way. Since I assume many of you reading this are adults, you would also have got these calls from others who are behind you in the road, seeking your advice on what they have to do.

Before I continue, I would like to point out that the word advice is pronounced like: ad in advertisement and wise for vice. So essentially people who are giving advise are people who are advertising their wiseness…….

Now let me put down my tinfoil hat and just get into the actual matter!

So the act of giving advice usually involves two parties or agents: the person giving the advice, and the person who receives the advice. Let’s start by looking at things from the perspective of the latter:

How to take advice

In many situations, you would be initiating the process of asking for tips and inputs on how to deal with situations. Of course, you have people who give you unsolicited advice and usually that is annoying for the person who is at the receiving end of it, because you know:

Nobody:

Absolutely nobody:

Le Random Person: Here’s why you are wrong and here is how to do it my way..

The person who advises you usually does it with good intent or out of concern for you. But why would you care? You feel like that person is patrolling you unnecessarily. People do hate this kind of virtue signalling as it makes them feel inferior and harbor resentment towards these people (or maybe it’s just me!).

But the truth is you cannot ignore what they say either! What they say could actually help you out once you take the advice as it is.

Even when you ask for advice, you have to take the advice with a lot of caveats. There are situations where you just practice what advice you receive and gain benefits from it. An example which that comes to my mind is scholarship applications. The rules of the game here are by and large constant with little variation and there are ways to gain a favorable advantage which you can get by seeking advice from past applicants.

But life isn’t always like that.

The only real constant in life is change.

What worked for them in the past would not work for you now. The paradoxical thing is that: the more experienced person you go to, the less likely is that person likely to give you advice relevant to your situation. There is so much intangibles that he or she cannot factor in, like your socioeconomic and cultural background, the environment around the situation which is always in a state of flux. We underestimate these small things that when added up, go a long way in changing the way you do things.

The best example for this is the impact of technology on my study habits! Till 2016 (my school years), I did not have good quality smartphones and I had all my reference material to study were all books. I tried to replicate this in college life, but then I stumbled upon two things: one being that the smartphone was being more addictive than ever before and secondly reference materials were becoming harder to find because of the level of specialization. The solution here is not to try to go back to the old solution, but to embrace the new way of life and use technology to aid my studies.

This was a bit of a tangent! But think about it,does it make sense to ask someone who last studied 10 years ago to give help on how to study in today’s world?

So basically if you are seeking advice, you need to identify the problem for which you are seeking advice (will the advice be directly applicable? If not, just keep the advice in mind and see if it works for you) and choose wisely who you seek advice from.

How to give advice?

Most of the time, we usually give advice to others who ask us based on our experiences. It is something which we can comfortably explain and give our perspective about. We try and think of key takeaways which the other person can use.

But if you really want others to take up your advice and follow it to the tee……

Don’t.

Do not expect them to do as you tell them to do. Because their worldviews and perspectives are very different. You may have strong feelings about an issue or a particular method to do things, but you cannot transplant your experience on them for them to truly realize what you are saying. You can try your best, but don’t take it to heart when they try something else or do not follow through on what you said.

Because the best thing anyone can learn from is self-experience.

It’s a bit like this: people can tell you that you should not put your hands on a fire as your hands will hurt. But the learning curve you go through when you actually put your hands in the fire is different from when people tell you to not put your hands in the fire.

Parents don’t give tutorials to babies to teach them to walk, do they? They try, they stumble, they try again and again till they learn to walk! You cannot reach your goal without falling, without stumbling, without getting hurt. For part of the journey is the actual journey itself!

Your advice will only have an impact if they really understand the gravity of the situation. Sometimes they get it immediately, sometimes it comes late or maybe never. But when it does, rest assured that your advice will be of great help to them.

So this is the end of my advice on the art of advising….

Oh wait.

Did I just……advertise my wiseness?

I initially titled this as ‘The truth about…’. Then I realized it’s hypocritical of me to take the high road and criticize people for doing the same. If you feel there is something you can add to this, or disagree about this or offer a different perspective, please feel free to tweet your thoughts here. Also if you liked this, don’t hesitate to clap and share this with your friends!