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"I did this and it was a mistake" is definitely useful advice. It might not necessarily be completely applicable to your situation, but learning from other people's failures can be as useful as learning from other people's success.
Especially when the most important elements of some people's success is things like "Have rich parents"
Listening to the regrets of others in the context of their lives is how you get wisdom, at least without first hand experience from making the same mistakes.
I love that I had the same idea as most people in here. You level headed assholes are the best.
I love when fat people tell me to eat 6 times a day, avoid fat and sugar, avoid white bread and pasta, drink and eat light products, yet sneak in a snack now and again to keep up my energy level, and to remember that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
I have to bite my lip to not blurt out: Yeah, so how's that working for ya'?
People can give solid advice even when they are struggling or even when they failed in the same area. A smoker can tell you smoking is bad. Someone whose marriage ended can still recognize unhealthy patterns. Someone who made financial mistakes can warn you about the traps they fell into. Two things can be true at the same time.
A useful skill is learning to tell when advice is grounded in reflection versus when it is shaped by unprocessed regret. People often speak from a mix of past experience and current emotion. Some insights are helpful, some are fear driven, and it takes a little judgment to sort out which is which.
So instead of accepting or rejecting advice automatically, it helps to look at where it is coming from. Are they sharing something they have actually thought through, or are they reacting to their own past? The value of the advice depends less on whether their life went well and more on how honestly they have understood it.
SUPER HELPFULL MISTER SMARTYPANTS< MAYBE TELL ME HOW TO DISTINGUISH THEM FROM EACH OTHER???? HMM?
I think this is only bad if they don't recognize their mistakes and just discourage you from even trying to achieve something.
Learning from other people's mistakes is a useful skill.
Learning from experience
So is people learning from their own mistakes, and many people never do. These skills come as a pair. The mistakes don't have to be yours to learn, but it helps make the lesson far more impactful.
If a man didn't make mistakes he'd own the world in a month.But if he didn't profit by his mistakes he wouldn't own a blessed thing.
-Jesse Livermore
Those are all experiences they had. Where the fuck else is advice gonna come from? At least someone who had a divorce knows more about marriage than someone who jas never even gone on a date.
While true, it's worth keeping the context in mind. At a work event I got seated with three divorced dudes who had like 6 wives between them. It was insufferable how much "advice" they offered and based on never having even met me before and the fact I was married kept insisting I would figure out my wife was cruel, vindicative, had no respect for me. and was cheating on me. Women were all terrible and a man could only live his best life without women. They were also grateful that when didn't sit then with any of those "useless women". I got told repeatedly how I should divorce and never date again.
See, that's not advice on marriage, tho. I also have been divorced, and she literally was all those things. But I won't say not to get married. Just don't get married to my ex; she'll fuck you up.
If anything, it's advice on how to be a misersble, lonely bastard.
That is just shitty culture. Unlikely where I am from. Perhaps there is a jaded dude here or there, sure. Ganging up on someone telling them they should divorce? Sounds crazy.
Feel free to tell those people to just shut the hecc up.
Yes it's much better to get advice from people who don't know what they're talking about. Because why would you listen to someone who's divorced about marriage it's not like they've been married, oh wait.
Sounds like this guy keeps getting shitty advice from everyone. I'm not going to listen to someone like that.
People learn from mistakes, not success.
Agreed. The OP makes it sound like you should only take advice from successful people, but successful people might just be lucky. We should also be careful to not take investment advice from lottery winners.
Yep. In my experience the real trick is to find the value in advice, regardless of who/what/why (as I give this advice haha). For example, we're trained to call out hypocrites but really, hypocrisy shouldn't be immediately discounted just because it's hypocrisy. A drug addict can absolutely tell someone they shouldn't do drugs. Hypocritical? Yep. Good advice from someone who really knows? Also yep.
Critical thinking is the single most important skill a human can learn.
A drug addict can absolutely tell someone they shouldn’t do drugs. Hypocritical? Yep.
It's not even hypocritical, the risk of addiction is literally the reason why you shouldn't even try certain drugs, and the addict not being able to quit even though they know that it's bad just proves the point.
I understood it as to recognise when their words are only packaged as "advice" from their bad experience (eg something general, vague, without specific useful logic you can take & apply to other situations, like "never get married", "never invest", "never build your own house", etc).
That is not the same as a fully argumented logic (which the person might indeed have learned from their own mistake), like "if your partner explicitly promised that in the first week of marriage they will steal you money, murder your neighbors & pin it on you, and you would not want that, don't marry them".
Basically if someone opens a muffin shop & it goes out of business, and you are thinking of opening a muffin shop ("Muffin tops for muffin bottoms"), you are gonna need to know/understand why & how exactly it went out of business, not just that it went out of business, it's a huge difference.
(It was in a neighborhood filled with lean muffintopless tops. So tweaking the business model only a little meant huge success.)
I disagree with OP in that it has to be trauma tho.
You can get stupid pushy advice what to do just bcs it worked by chance for someone (in a million) decades ago.
Just watch out for people projecting their specific problems onto your situation when you don't have those problems. Mostly a problem with unsolicited "advice"
listen to people who warn you about something that fucked them up.
don't touch the fire - person with burned hands
Rereading the post, it isn't that you should ignore the advice of people who failed, but you need to recognize what kind of "advice" you're getting.
Someone can fail and give you good advice, but the advice described isn't that.
The way I heard it, and it changed my life, was "All advice is autobiographical." You have to filter it through your opinion of the person, how self aware they are, and how much you think they're sincerely trying to think of you when giving advice.
Edit: And, yes, every time I see this discussed there are droves of snarky people thinking they're being so clever by pointing out the "irony" which I think is really just reflecting their cynicism. Social skills require nuance and understanding that no rule can be applied 100%.
This is the correct interpretation. The post is wrong in how you should view that information. The post is actually a tad cynical and arrogant.
"Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth" -Baz Luhrmann
So many of the other heavily upvoted comments are taking the absolutely least charitable interpretation of the comment.
It can be hard to discern what is good or bad advise, especially if you are less experienced, young, and also if the advise came from an authority figure in your life, such as a parent as mentioned in the post. Yes, I am speaking from experience, my parents gave extremely bad advise when I was growing up. How was I supposed to know they're bad advise to begin with? I was too young to know they're practically bad until I followed and it put me in trouble. And now as an adult and gained my own experience after countering what they say, it was only then I realised their insistent advise (read: instructions) are projections of their own insecurities and unresolved trauma. I have a schadenfreude now that they regret how they parented. I don't exactly blame my parents, they grew up in an authoritarian culture where absolute obedience and conformity are paramount. But even so, I am wary if I get kids someday and let my parents babysit them. I don't know what kind of nonsense they'll say and teach to the kids, especially that my mom is superstitious.
The problem is that successful people can also give bad advice.
A common one is the Boomer advice of walking into a place, asking to see a manager, and talking with them about getting a job. That strategy might have worked in the 80's, but it doesn't work today.
A professor once gave me similar advice when I was trying to get into grad school. I repeated a bunch of advice I had heard from other students who were struggling with the same thing, and he said "Why are you listening to them? Go ask the grad students here who have already gotten into grad school."
It was such obvious advice in retrospect, but it was eye-opening for me at the time, and I've applied it to many other parts of life.
There is a difference between “advice” on how to do something vs. “advice” on what to avoid or how not to do it.
I would gladly take advice on how to do something from someone who succeeded, and I’d equally gladly take advice on what not to do from someone who failed.
They are both invaluable.
Rich person's guide to getting rich: "It's fairly simple. All it takes is a little bit of hard work, dedication, and an initial investment of five million dollars. I did it, my father did it, and his father and grandfathers did it before him. I come from a long line of self-made millionaires. It must be in our genes."
"Don't learn from other people's mistakes, make your own so you too can become a jaded cunt."
Sounds like a 5* skill to have...
Learning from your own mistakes is vital for improvement, but learning from other people's mistakes, so you don't have to suffer consequences, is a superpower.
survivorship bias speed run incoming
stop worrying about where advice comes from and just actually think about shit
That’s the first thing I thought when I read this post and I don’t understand why you are not upvoted more.
OP wants me to take advice from the person who won the lottery and disregard all the others who sunk stupid amounts of money and got nothing to show for it? I’d rather hear them all and make an informed decision.
Sounds more like linkedinlunatics than genuine advice.
What? The best thing you can do is to learn from other's mistakes.
I mean if they're saying something like "don't do this thing, because I did it and it was a mistake". E.g. Don't manipulate people for financial gain, because you will lose your friends and die alone like me". That's good advice.
But if they're saying something like "do this thing, because even though I failed, you will succeed". E.g. Lie to people all you want, to gain what you want, just be smarter than me when doing it". That's bad advice.
Advice given by the same person on the same topic, just with different morals.
Personally I believe that's this is the best people really can do. Wisdom is learning from ones mistakes. Domino this is sharing their wisdom
It's is up to you to do whatever you feel is best with it.
My divorced friend can tell me that their marriage went terribly wrong. It doesn't mean that I should not marry either. Ask why, ask what went wrong and take that into consideration.
I'd rather have advice and feedback from personal experience than theoretical advice from someone who has not tried (and failed) at the subject
Elon Musk successfully did the thing. Donald Trump also successfully did the thing. And several others like them successfully did the thing.
Does being successful at a thing make you a role model? ... Not really.
Success or failure matter less than what you learn from it. And I think most of us would agree that the above examples learned the wrong fucking things.
I used to work in the trades and the worst advice I ever got was from older men who forced their advice on me. I never asked for their advice. They just felt the need to trauma dump on me for all their regrets by giving me "advice" that was always meant for their younger selves.
If I had ever taken any of their unasked and unwanted advice, I would have ended up as miserable as they were and feeling like I lived a life of regret.
The best advice I got from an old guy at work when I was young was "start putting 100 dollars extra into your super every pay" (old man wished he'd looked into saving for retirement a lot sooner), the worst was "save yourself some trouble and go find a woman you hate and buy her a house" (old man whose marriage was based on him not being there and which immediately broke down when he stopped working away and wished he'd never bothered with it).
I’ve said it before but perspective taking is a struggle for a large swath of the population. Yes, you’ve had an experience that is similar. But how you felt, etc…only belongs to you. Their experiences do not need your filter to be valid. Recalling your own mistakes is fine, assuming everyone else is making them is not. That’s all. I do try to give helpful mom advice when asked without going too hard. And I encourage those who ask to think about their health and safety and happiness and plan ahead and that’s about it.
I have successfully done bad decisions.
It's possible to be successful at something and provide the correct advice to not do that thing...
Addendum to this is also to recognise value/arguments/data regardless of "if that person went through that or not".
Don't disregard a valid point just bcs that person doesn't have unique personal experience on the subject (which is always subjective, not average, and mostly an experience of the past, so not necessarily the current or future conditions).