It’s Time To Stop Giving Unsolicited Advice.
I found this meme and I relate to it so much. + Mark Zuckerberg & Steve Jobs
There are Two States in Life: Reactivity, or Proactivity.
No one’s immune from one or the other.
For the majority of growing up, I operated and was driven by reactivity.
Eg: When someone gives me unsolicited advice… I would react in a way that “I’ll prove to you by doing the otherwise”.
I never knew why I operated in that way. But now, thinking back, it is a rebellious streak in response to how annoying getting unwanted advice is.
Getting unwanted advice from people, especially from a person whose lives are those you don’t wish to have, and don’t align with your values, can be dangerous.
It’s like this podcast (can’t remember which) I listened to many years ago that featured Mizz Nina (Malaysian Humanitarian). She mentioned that upon her transition to becoming closer to religion, she has never become preachy about it with her family members, and would not push her ideas upon them UNLESS THEY ASK.
This made me wonder so much.
Am I preachy? Do I give unsolicited advice to people who don’t ask?
Of course I have! I’m no saint.
Now I try to remind myself that “unless someone asks, I should not give unsolicited advice”.
But Life’s not so Utopia like That.
You’ll most likely bump into them. Relatives and close friends, out of the blue, would ask you how you have been doing and immediately project to you how you should live your life.
In such uncontrollable situations, the only thing you can control is allowing how much information to enter your mind and heart.
Learning How to Build & Protect your Wall is so Important.
So that whatever that they spew out, you don’t let it penetrate the walls you’ve built. Most of us, are not living our lives. We try too hard to live based on what other people think is right.
They have their opinions. And you have yours.
And it’s totally fine to have opinions.
What’s not okay is that must we project our ideas to another person who did not ask to hear about it in the first place?
Unsolicited Advice & Its Effects on Businesses
An entrepreneur once told me this,
“Never, ever ever let someone else tells you HOW you should run your business. No two businesses are the same. What works for the other may not work for you. Sometimes we’re so eager to implement what works for others that when we do it, it destroyed what we’ve built.”
This is the cost of unsolicited advice.
When not taken with a grain of salt, can ruin your whole life.
Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs
In the early days of Facebook, Mark asked Steve for some advice on how Facebook should steer its ship.
Guess what Steve Jobs told Mark?
He told Mark to go to India and find answers there.
(1) It’s super true that you can find clarity through travels, but what’s more important here is that (2) Steve Jobs did not give Mark an “oh you must do a, b, c, d” answer. He gave open-ended advice so that Mark could find more answers, within himself.
Forgive me,
If I have given you unsolicited advice before. And remind me, if I do somehow project and give you unsolicited advice.
I’m human, as well.
F