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Listen to the best advice: Both giving and listening to advice are hard work. It puts an unfair amount of stress on the person giving you advice. And for the one taking it, we don’t always know what the advice giver feels if we don’t take their advice. See, this has already started getting complicated. However, the main point to focus on is about unsolicited advice from people. It is one thing to get advice when you seek. But there are sometimes people who give advice even when you don’t ask them.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away doing the exact opposite

– G.K.Chesterton

Listen to the best advice

The point about listening to the best advice is in what we do about it right? Just like feedback, even advice needs to be taken on its merit. This means, we must ignore some of the advice that people give us. Instead of listening to everything and working on them, we must measure them objectively and see if they make any sense.

Listen to the best advice and do the exact opposite: This is a rebellious statement, but I like the content of it. Not all people have the capability to advise us properly. Instead of blindly following the crowd, focus internally and identify what means the most to you.

Why Do We Seek advice?

Ideally I think none of us really need someone telling us what to do. Somewhere deep down, we know it already – we all are smart enough to figure out what to do with our lives and there are so many ways we can get at the results we want. And sometimes we just want to explore. None of us ask advice or seek advice cos we are desperate, we are not.

We seek it cos we need an idea, a thought and sometimes a support.

Unfortunately, very few people understand the purpose of giving advice when they are asked for it. Most times they take a pedantic tone and give you a lecture on what you should do and how you should go about it. Some of them even take the liberty to call you stupid and immature and the decision is completely wrong.

What to do about the advice we receive?

My honest suggestion is that – listen to them with utmost respect – laugh about it in your head cos you know that it is going to make an awesome story someday. Don’t take it too seriously, most times even the ones who are giving it are not that serious either – they are giving it for the sake of giving an advice.

So, listen to it with keen interest, decide on it later, let your thoughts sink in. Listen to your mind, talk to yourselves loudly. If someone is telling you something emphatically, it just means that they are stressing on a point which seems important to them and to their world. They might mean nothing to you and it is completely ok to treat it like garbage.

There is no sense in treating everything you listen to with utmost respect. Some people and some thoughts don’t really deserve that.