The Trick of Advice

Advice is a tricky concept. At a base level, advice and the teachings of others are how you have grown up to live your life. Your parents, teachers, mentors, and friends have all taught you how to do different things and how to move from one stage of your life to the next. Through advice, you learn to grow up. You can depend on the advice of others to then “do” in your own life to learn from your experiences. The advice given is typically based on their own experiences and then you can choose to implement it into your own life. Advice moves from the teacher to the student.

The trick of advice is it shows you a way that has already been done. It shows you a way for you to replicate. It shows you how to copy and implement it into your own life. If you’re looking to “make it” in life, advice isn’t going to help you. Making it requires you make it. You can’t simply ask someone else how to make it. Making it requires you to learn, through your own experience, thousands of different ways how to not make it until you uncover the one way to make it. This journey of discovery can’t possibly be taught through replicable or practical words of advice.

When you “make it” you don’t make it because of advice. You make it because of trial and error, iteration, learning, and having an internal desire to find a way. Once you make it, you have filled a void in the world. Filling this void enables you to make it easier for others to make it in the same way you did. Once you have “made it” you can now become someone who is able to give advice based on your own journey.

The trick is once again, you can’t make it off of just advice but by making it, you’re now able to give advice to others. If instead of opting to “make it” yourself, you just followed the advice of someone else who had already “made it,” you wouldn’t be “making it,” you would just be repeating what has already been done. Making it is a process of creation. Following advice is a process of replication. You can be successful by following advice but you won’t necessarily be unique— you won’t “make it.

Instead of asking for advice in your quest to “make it”, ask for feedback. Feedback is the backbone of all the trials you will undergo, the iterations you will construct, and the honesty you seek that will make you discover. Advice will only take you so far.