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What's Your Advice?

Would you take advice from a stranger?

I sometimes do.

And sometimes offer it.

Lots of it.

Especially on how to live a better life.

Most of what I say is simple.

Eat clean.

Lift heavy.

Drink water.

Move.

Stuff people know.

Stuff a lot of people don’t do.

I talk about the past because remembering is fun.

And try to remind us that our memories are tainted.

By time.

By hope.

And maybe just a little bit of sadness.

It wasn’t always as good as we remember.

But what we learned from it put us where we are today.

Which can be applied to big picture thinking too.

Hate the past as much as you want, it got you here.

And here is not a bad place to be.

I also talk about this place to be.

How to make it better.

Old hometowns, new AI and robots, and ideas.

How to have ‘em.

How to keep having more of ‘em.

Because I’m an expert at ideas.

And the advice I give myself is to keep working hard at turning ideas into action.

The advice I get is varied.

Some say do.

Some say don’t.

Some say stay.

Some stay go.

And some say things that make me feel deep empathy.

For them, not me.

My Papaw was a big advice giver.

His words of wisdom were often just common sense, but I didn’t know that until I was older.

His best advice came from examples.

From watching him “do” and not talk about it.

Like dropping off a bag of groceries at my Mom’s house without telling her.

Or stopping to give some sodas from the cooler in the back of his truck to a couple of guys doing road work in the summer sun.

Putting a twenty in the plate every Sunday at the Church he built.

His actions were better than his advice.

I don’t remember my Mom’s advice, and my Dad’s mostly centered around how to please a woman.

That was his go to summation on most things in life.

Which didn’t end up helping me near as much as you might imagine.

But that shows just how much the world changes, how fast it changes.

Advice that once worked on how to deal with people, may not work as well as it did.

Maybe words of wisdom are like arguments, you pick and choose your battles.

Wisdom comes from experience, and experience happens when you take action.

Try and fail.

Try and succeed.

Either can happen.

Or nothing will happen if the first part is ignored.

And we’re good at ignoring advice.

Sometimes it’s like we collectively didn’t learn our lesson.

So we do it again and call it a cycle.

Or a pattern.

Then we give each other advice on how to break the pattern, and get mad when we don’t follow it.

But that’s the difference between knowing…

And doing.

Which is the number one reason I’m skeptical of advice from strangers.

I know what I’ve done.

I know what I am in the process of doing.

What I don’t know are a stranger’s bona fides.

Which makes me pause to consider.

Is it worth listening to?

Warren Buffet gave everyone advice on how to invest in the 80’s.

Look at everything you have in your house and buy stock in those companies.

Invest $100 a month in those stocks.

Don’t stop.

Which is boring as hell.

Where is the get rich stock tip that’s going to make us all millionaires overnight?!?

But…

If every single person in America followed that advice, there would be a nation of extremely wealthy people.

If you consider money a measure of wealth.

Because some folks think health is the greatest wealth.

Well, we had advice on that too.

Twenty years ago, or more, a lot of experts said “Take sugar out of your diet.”

Because sugar is very bad for you.

Worse than crack.

If everybody followed that advice, we would have a nation of fit people, or healthier people.

Except…

If we all stopped eating sugar, the companies we owned stock in would go under or change their business model and we all wouldn’t be rich.

They added sugar to almost everything, we got addicted to it, and bought it by the truckload, and they made tons of money from doing it.

So be careful about advice.

Once you reach a certain age, you can trust your gut.

That’s where all the accumulated words of wisdom are stored.

So when you tell someone something, and they say you’re full of shit, it’s probably true.

The gut instinct doesn’t lie.

What is your best advice?

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