People feel the need to validate their own choices. For this reason, when other people ask them for advice, they tend to recommend “do things like I do things.” It’s completely understandable, but wrong.

Everyone has their own set of beliefs, their own life experiences, their own preferences, their own dislikes. Because of this, often major decisions can be made completely differently by two people in the same situation, and both can be the correct decision. The key is that when someone comes to you for advice on a situation, you have to disassociate yourself from the decision. It’s not what’s best for you, it’s what’s best for them. Of course, if they knew the answer already, they wouldn’t be coming to you for advice, right? Well, that’s true, but it’s important to help people come up with their own decisions, rather than pushing your own perspective on them.

After having read that, you’re probably thinking that I have a specific incident in mind, where I asked someone for advice, and didn’t get it. You’d be wrong though. I can’t think of a specific incident, though I know it’s happened. What tends to happen though, is that I’ll get that form of “advice” from someone once, and then not ask them again.

I used to give bad advice to people on computers. I remember being asked to recommend computers to people, and recommending Amigas. Don’t get me wrong, they were great computers, but in the instances I’m thinking of, the people who were asking my advice would have been much better served by buying a PC (which they all ended up doing anyway - thankfully nobody listens to 12 year old kids ;)) There were a lot of people who could have benefitted from buying an Amiga, but those weren’t the people asking my advice.

So, having realized that I used to give really bad advice, I’ve tried to reform myself. The end result is that I tend to give much less direct advice. I’m far more likely to point people to a resource to do more research than I am to say “Take the job.” or “Buy a Panasonic DVD player” (Sorry Jason - had to get a mention in there somewhere.) I wish I could be more concrete with an example, but it’s just one of those things that I’ve been thinking about casually for a while now, and I’m left with mental impressions and not much else.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen.” - Homer