Can I Give You Some Advice?

The article says we most often reject advice and prefer our own intuition and decision making.

However I can think of several critical junctures in my life where I listened to others’ advice and am grateful that I did in hindsight. They could see my situation with more clarity than me and gave sound advice.

Advice is useless, experience and learning matters. Maybe should tell experiences instead of giving advice

I've found out that advice that works simply highlights truths already recognized by whoever you talk to. On the other hand if you try to dump your own thoughts, those will be rejected. So my advice for giving advice is to understand first what your audience believes in and speak in those terms.

I think there are many dimensions to the perception of advice. I've ruminated heavily on this topic before; it took like 4,000+ words to express my thoughts, and even with that, I still have some new ideas to ponder.

Particularly in the online landscape, advice often feels superficial and doesn't account for nuances and personal aspects. Even worse, social media fosters absolutes - presented as an ultimatum.

"This is the right way to do it, and failure to concede to this truth means that you are doomed to failure, and the blame is solely on you." I can hardly imagine there's advice with the expectation of it not being taken.

When advice works, it's "see, I told you." Yet when advice fails, then it's just because you didn't do it right. Survivorship bias, in effect, makes the advice infallible.

In my experience, advice's value comes from the exposure to a concept or possibility unseen before, bringing one down a path of experiences that bring them closer to their desired outcome. Everything else is just fluff - words without seeing.

I think advice highlights only the conclusion, not the intermediate steps. A concept like "share your ideas online to have better conversations," for example. What ideas? Where online? What's a better conversation?

But strangely, it may also encourage one to take risks to crawl towards that outcome, fostering insight through those new experiences, regardless of whether the initial idea succeeds or fails.

Perhaps in response to said advice, one posts haphazardly on one platform that's too toxic. The inclement feelings push them toward one another, but it's too inactive. You make some mistakes in conveying thoughts, so you make changes to improve clarity.

When the words of advice are recalled again, the concepts have become visually clear. The experiences of developing prose and finding the right platform to facilitate it. This is what "sharing online" has come to mean. This is what a "better conversion" is - to oneself.

Those mental images represent the ideals behind the advice. Once, they may have conjured blanks, but now there's a clear vision of how they fit into and build one's own story - it's what everything means to you. Perhaps the exposure was a catalyst, but all the actions that led to this outcome came from the self.

I think it may also be interesting to delve into other reasons for people not seeking or accepting advice, aside from discounting others' experiences.

Perhaps one wants to save face. Vulnerability is often difficult, especially when the pressure to appear "self-made" is pervasive. Maybe asking is seen as a burden on others, and some feel obligated to make do with their own insight. I wonder what the distribution of responses would be.

I am not sure if there are studies on this, but it seems to me that while someone may not consciously demonstrate an action regarding a given piece of advice, some process of both internalization and mimetic desire likely leads them to incorporate at least some part of that advice for future decision making. But I think maybe I just talking about nature and nurture, in some sense.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory