Advice, Part 2: How to Take It

Continuing my earlier ramble about giving advice, it seems appropriate to ramble about how to take advice.

Of course, you're likely asking yourself, "Why should Ben talk about how to take advice if he doesn't think people should give it?" Well, mainly because not everyone feels like I do and will give you advice anyways, but also because even I believe that there are exceptions to the rule, moments when you really do need to shut up and listen to what someone is telling you. The tricky part, obviously, is knowing when. And in the spirit of not giving advice, I'm going to try to keep this particular in my own frame of reference and let you, the reader, make their own decisions.

In general, I don't think that people should ever blindly follow the advice of another. If someone is giving me advice, I listen to what they have to say and then decide to act upon it. If I know the advice to be somehow faulty I disregard it, and if I believe that I have no clue about my situation and trust the person's knowledge I will choose to follow it. To me, the advice is just another input in my decision-making process, not the process itself. However, life is rarely that clear-cut so deciding can be a challenge.

Despite that challenge, the real pain in deciding whether to follow advice is in following your own; as the cliche goes, "Your own advice is always the hardest to follow." How often will you tell a friend not to do something and you find yourself doing the exact same thing? I've seen it happen to other people and it's happened to me as well. It's tough; how do you convince yourself that the advice you gave someone else really applies to you? Eventually you will...or you won't. Either way (assuming you live) you'll just have more experience to base your advice, or in my case your discussions, on.

So to wrap up this two-parter. Advice shouldn't be an absolute in either giving or receiving. It should be part of a discussion and decision process that has one person making the decision that's best for them and the other person respecting, understanding, or at the very least not interfering with that decision. And don't feel too bad if you can't follow your own advice; if it were easy to do there wouldn't be an associated cliche.