Sometime back, I was trying to show off at a swimming pool. I had barely known how to float on water but my hubris couldn’t allow me to play at the shallow end. So, I ventured to the deeper end. As soon as I noticed that my feet did not touch the ground, I started drinking water and flapping incessantly until I held the bar on the side. It was the toughest one-centimeter swim of my life.
We have all asked for advice and never followed it. We have all given our best advice to someone and got disappointed when they never followed it. No one really listens to advise. But that has not stopped us from asking for it and giving it.
Most of the times when we ask for advice, we are really not interested in following it, we only want to hear something that will give us solace or help us justify the status quo.
Our current culture is oversupplied with advice. Everywhere you turn there is advise from how to conduct testicular surgery to how to clip your toe nails.
It seems that we are in the middle of a pandemic. A pandemic of stories of people telling us how they made it, from grass to grace. Those stories seldom help anyone. You only feel inspired for two seconds and then go back to your default state of being uninspired. It’s like being hungry and you only keep inhaling the nice aroma of food from your neighbor.
In fact, even the best inspirational stories are only highlights. It is like watching the highlights of a football game where you only get to see when the red card was given, when a penalty was missed, when a goal was scored. It can never be a substitute to experiencing the game. I digress
But why don’t we take advice even when we ask for it. I think we have been conditioned to quickly get to answers whenever we face problems. We want quick fixes to our perceived problems and even when we ask questions, they are only curiosity questions. We actually don’t want to hear the answer. We are good at avoiding the problem at hand while focusing on distractions.
With access to a lot of information about solutions to any problem, we have become addicted to being told “how to”. How to become rich, how to lose weight, how to make love… Too many how to’s that have not helped us much.
But a person who is drowning does not ask for a lecture on how to stop drowning. Neither does a woman whose wig is on fire take time to google the seven ways of extinguishing a wig. They just do what needs to be done.
If your doctor told you that you will die unless you lose five kilos, you will not need to attend a five-week seminar on weight loss to get the job done.
Advice can only work if both the giver and receiver understand the problem. And its rarely needed.
But don’t take my word for it.
Life is life
Fabio