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.
Essentially a person has to be already seeking and open to the advice in order to receive it. And if they are ready to receive it then they'll likely hear it and do something with it. But more often than not, people hear advice and then continue to do what they were going to do in the first place.
This kind of ties into the "do you want me to listen or do you want advice?" discourse we've had over the years
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.
nis0s•4mo ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory