Advice.
Easily given and extremely difficult to be taken.
Wouldn’t you agree?
We give advice to people and often given back. Sometimes its important. Most of the time, unsolicited.
Usually, “giving advice” is an exercise in vain. Very few people genuinely ask for advice. Most of the time, when people come to you for advice, they have already made up their mind. All they want is validation and artificial reinforcement.
However, this post is about “taking advice”. When we take advice, we usually have a set criteria to filter out people whom we take advice from.
Would you take parenting advice from someone who is not a parent?
Would you take relationship advice from someone who is not married?
Would you take finance advice from someone who has filed for bankruptcy?
Most likely not. The advice will be automatically discarded through our set filters. We believe that someone cannot advise in a situation where they don’t have any experience. This is true to certain extent. A person would naturally be more knowledgeable about the situation when he has full exposure of the breadth and depth of the experience. One cannot judge the situation fully until he is in it. I agree. However, this could be limiting at times. We also tend to discard the advice from people who have failed. For advice and inspiration, we lean more towards the people who are successful or who have “made it”, conventionally speaking.
One will be perfectly comfortable to take finance advice from a millionaire but be hesitant to take from someone who is bankrupt. One will naturally be inclined to take relationship advice from someone in a healthy relationship and be hesitant to take from someone who went through a failed relationship.
This happens because our filters for seeking advice only consist of “What to do” and not “What not to do”. When we ask for advice, usually we are looking for “What to do”.
Very often, the great advice is “what not to do”.
A bankrupt can tell you all about how not to go bankrupt and avoid the mistakes. Someone who has failed the relationship can tell you all the reasons why it failed.
Someone who is not a parent has most likely been parented to. What he can advice about parenting is something no other parent can do. The reason is – he is coming from the perspective of being a child. He is not a parent but he has lived through and observed his parents all his life while growing up. He has seen parents in action through child’s eyes. He can provide invaluable insights into parenting.
When you take advice from other parents, they are deeply submerged in their role of a parent. Their advice will only come from the perspective of a parent, which is hardly useful. When parents interact with other parents, they rarely discuss the nuances of raising a child. Its mostly surface level exchange of advice about how long to breastfeed, how to make them sleep, what to feed them, which school is better etc etc. Most parents usually figure out these surface level things by themselves.
In short, the point is – it may not be always wise to dismiss people whom we think would know anything valuable about particular situation. Sometimes they are the right people to go for.
Having said this, there is nothing wrong with an expert advise. If tooth is broken, one wouldn’t go to a lawyer instead of a dentist.
