Adored this, Molly. I've been thinking along similar lines lately as it relates to advice and its utility. Advice is mostly a self-reflection vehicle for the advice-giver, which is useful for both of you: useful for them because they get to learn about what they are yearning for (usually the driving force behind the advice), and useful for you because you can learn from their experience (by reflecting on how their advice lands with you.. advice that aligns with us feels expansive; like 'yes, this is what i needed to hear. this resonates.' and advice that doesn't agree with our self image makes us contract).
What advice doesn't do is tell us what *we should do*, only we can do that. That decision needs to come from a combination of self-understanding and personal ambition (what we want to do with our unique set of interests, aspirations, and predispositions). The truth is that no one knows us as well as we know ourselves, but that's an uncomfortable truth because it means: we have to make our own decisions, and live with them. If we blindly take the advice of others, we can say "hey, I just got bad advice and I took it, oh well." But if we do the thing *we* think we should do, we are the ones to blame if it doesn't work. We gave *ourselves* the bad advice! The flip-side is that we are also the ones that get to fully own the win if it goes well, and we tend to be more committed to making a path we chose independently work.. there's something here about complete self-agency being uniquely energizing. But reaching a state where our self-trust and self-awareness meet at some sort of critical point that gives us enough confidence to leap at our own intuition takes time. I think it's worth waiting for, though. Congrats on reaching your critical point :)
An excerpt on resisting advice from one of my recent substack pieces, "you vs. you":
"I was discussing [advice] with a founder friend who said something along the lines of 'I’ve generally found that successful people’s advice is what they would have done to avoid the pain their success required.' Which: true. It’s hard for successful people to give you the “secret sauce”, but they can tell you how to not hate yourself by the end of your journey, so they typically do that, instead. But that advice should not be confused with the advice that will help you win. Because, as I’m about to get into in this piece, that can ultimately only come from one person: yourself."
There's too much to say to this typically wonderful post, but I have to make a minor note first (amidst packing for travel and EOY preparations): I couldn't believe the de Mello quote at the footer! I had no idea how widely, if at all, he was still read. How did you come across him? I find him extremely fun!
Adored this, Molly. I've been thinking along similar lines lately as it relates to advice and its utility. Advice is mostly a self-reflection vehicle for the advice-giver, which is useful for both of you: useful for them because they get to learn about what they are yearning for (usually the driving force behind the advice), and useful for you because you can learn from their experience (by reflecting on how their advice lands with you.. advice that aligns with us feels expansive; like 'yes, this is what i needed to hear. this resonates.' and advice that doesn't agree with our self image makes us contract).
What advice doesn't do is tell us what *we should do*, only we can do that. That decision needs to come from a combination of self-understanding and personal ambition (what we want to do with our unique set of interests, aspirations, and predispositions). The truth is that no one knows us as well as we know ourselves, but that's an uncomfortable truth because it means: we have to make our own decisions, and live with them. If we blindly take the advice of others, we can say "hey, I just got bad advice and I took it, oh well." But if we do the thing *we* think we should do, we are the ones to blame if it doesn't work. We gave *ourselves* the bad advice! The flip-side is that we are also the ones that get to fully own the win if it goes well, and we tend to be more committed to making a path we chose independently work.. there's something here about complete self-agency being uniquely energizing. But reaching a state where our self-trust and self-awareness meet at some sort of critical point that gives us enough confidence to leap at our own intuition takes time. I think it's worth waiting for, though. Congrats on reaching your critical point :)
An excerpt on resisting advice from one of my recent substack pieces, "you vs. you":
"I was discussing [advice] with a founder friend who said something along the lines of 'I’ve generally found that successful people’s advice is what they would have done to avoid the pain their success required.' Which: true. It’s hard for successful people to give you the “secret sauce”, but they can tell you how to not hate yourself by the end of your journey, so they typically do that, instead. But that advice should not be confused with the advice that will help you win. Because, as I’m about to get into in this piece, that can ultimately only come from one person: yourself."
There's too much to say to this typically wonderful post, but I have to make a minor note first (amidst packing for travel and EOY preparations): I couldn't believe the de Mello quote at the footer! I had no idea how widely, if at all, he was still read. How did you come across him? I find him extremely fun!