The Best Advice I’ve Ever Gotten
The Best Advice I’ve Ever Gotten
I know nothing. (Not a Jon Snow reference, though if I knew how to embed a gif of him and Ygritte in that scene, I would do it here.)
And of course that’s not literally true, but in the grand scheme of things, I know very little. None of us know much. We all have, at best, just a few decades’ worth of experiencing and reading and studying the universe and its many complicated phenomena—from interpersonal relationship to astrophysics and everything in between—and it’s unrealistic for us to ever expect to know very much.
And even if we don’t focus on all knowledge in our universe—even if we just focus on the knowledge we all need to go about our daily lives (take the the interpersonal relationships and leave the astrophysics, let’s say)—there’s tons we don’t know or haven’t experienced.
But that’s okay, because we are almost always surrounded by people who know more than us or have lived different experiences or look at this from a different perspective. We can ask them for advice!
Ask and Ye Shall Receive
I love asking for advice. I’d ask people on the street what they thought of my grocery budget if it was socially acceptable. I love the process of laying out a situation I’m in or a problem I have and leveraging the minds of those around me to help figure out how to make the most of it or solve it.
I wasn’t always good at this, and I still have a while to go. I like having the answers—who doesn’t? But actively practicing coming from a position of inviting feedback and advice has gotten me through moments of indecision, insecurity, and frustration much faster than dealing with them on my own.
I also like passing on advice that’s worked for me. I thought about not writing this blog, even though I’ve wanted to for a while, because the following six pieces of advice have impacted me so much that I’ve probably told each one to at least ten different people, and if I publish them all together on the internet, I lose out on getting to distribute them to my loved ones in real life.
But then it feels unfair to hoard these gems from the world. Here you have it: the advice that’s changed my life! May it change yours, too.
The Six Best Pieces of Advice I’ve Ever Gotten
(In chronological order.)
1. “You’ve got to send an email if you want to get one”: put the energy you want to receive into the world. Sitting and waiting gets you nowhere. — my mother
The case at hand: I’d just gotten my first email account (shoutout 2002) and, upon refreshing my inbox on-and-off for a few days, realized I’d been hustled, scammed, bamboozled; it wasn’t at all the magical virtual container that filled itself with messages from your loved ones that I’d imagined. I complained to my mom that I had no emails and she asked me one question: “How many emails have you sent?”
The answer was zero.
I was sitting there, waiting for people to think about emailing me and then to actually doing it, all the while not thinking about emailing anyone else.
My mom’s advice galvanized me, and I immediately sent out three emails: one to my aunt, one to my friend from school, and one to my dad (who was upstairs, but still).
And when I checked my inbox the next day, it contained three replies.
Boom! The magic of sending out what you want to get back. In this case, it was emails, but in general, I’ve used the same approach in many other situations, especially when wanting to make new connections (whether professional or social). I get out there, I say hi, I project things I believe in (camaraderie and authenticity)—and it works.
2. “I stopped seeing him as what he should be to me and started seeing him as what he could be to me”: you get to define your expectations for family relationships; define something possible. — Megan, best friend
I can’t place exactly where I was when Megan told me this—I was either talking to her on the phone as I walked laps around my backyard when we were about sixteen, or we were in Nichol’s Arboretum in Ann Arbor four years later, walking laps around a wheat field. I remember walking, I remember seeking out shade, and I remember her voice.
She was talking about a family member of hers who had never really been there for her in the ways that we as children expect our older family members to be there for us (that is, to show up when we need them, have the resources necessary to help us, be an example to follow). And if she kept waiting for him to be that way, she said, she’d be so disappointed and frustrated that she wouldn’t enjoy any of the time she spent with him, even the fun moments. So she stopped hoping for him to be the responsible older family member. She rewrote her expectations. She expected him to be the person who would be down to try new things with her. And it worked—she could enjoy the kind of person that he was capable of being to her without feeling hopelessly frustrated about all that was lacking.
I wouldn’t espouse this in all relationships—I think having a high and unwavering standard for most friendly or romantic connections is a good idea; lowering expectations there can be a slippery slope—but I think it works wonders for family relationships that you’ll be stuck with forever and with family members who are unwilling or unable to change. I’ve learned to apply it to some of my more complicated family relationships and it’s helped me enjoy the people I have around me for what they can give me and not get hung up on what they can’t.
3. “Invest in the gritty business of living calmly”: you can only give of yourself what you have to give; make the time for you. – Maggie, coworker & friend
When I met Maggie, I was in dire need of meeting Maggie. I was a few months into my first-ever full-time job and stressing out rather mightily, very much wanting to be the best at everything and getting frustrated that I wasn’t. That frustration, coupled with the fact that while I’d juggled hard classes, work, a social life while at college, my methods for meeting a diverse and demanding set of responsibilities weren’t scalable (in the real world, I learned, you can’t just not sleep much for several days on end without serious consequences), meant that I found myself crying at my desk the middle of the day more than once.
After one of those breakdowns—I think the case at hand was a combination of being ditched by one of the two friends I had in New York City, having worked past 10 p.m. three days in a row, and feeling bloated and greasy after the late-night snacks that fueled me through those late nights—Maggie, who worked on the same team as I did and who I’d connected with over similar values and family structures, gave some advice that really changed my life.
It didn’t matter if I killed it at work if the ways that allowed me to kill it killed me, too.
I needed to find balance. I needed to invest not just in the outputs of my life, but also the inputs: sleep. Vegetables. Self-reflection.
It was more meaningful than “remember self-care”; it was more nuanced. It was about setting realistic expectations for myself and finding ways to meet them. And then not compromising on those ways. The gritty business of living calmly.
For me, it meant things like going for a walk at least once a day, eating fresh fruit for breakfast, going to one new place a weekend. And doing that consistently for months helped me develop a social life on the east coast, a work-life balance I could live with, and the mental bandwidth to make it through a stressful week at work without spiraling.
4. “Don’t ask for an update on a stressful situation—if people have good news, they’ll share it; if they have bad news, let them share it on their own time”: give people space to process. — my dad
We were waiting to find out if my sister got into her top-choice school. I was unable to get into her head space and imagine that maybe she didn’t want to be pestered six times a day about whether there’d been an update; I was only thinking about it from my own perspective, which was that I was curious and wanted to know (and to then celebrate with her). So pester her I did, until I realized it really bothered her, and even then, I had a hard time understanding why. (Empathy is not my strongest skill.) My dad then gave me that advice, which I’ve thought about regularly since. It applies to situations where you’re waiting in suspense, yes, but also as a general reminder that everyone processes things differently and that they are entitled to space to do that.
I tend to jump into situations and say things without thinking through how it might impact the other person, and that’s selfish. Having this advice hasn’t stopped me completely from doing that, but it has helped me to curb it.
5. “You don’t need a North Star; make smaller strides instead, like crossing lilypads”: make life decisions based on the other opportunities they’ll bring you and the general direction they’ll send you in. — Angie, mentor & friend
Angie gave me the gift of this metaphoric advice one night over dinner as I explained the paralysis I felt in my life at the time. I liked my work, and I was good at it, but what was I aiming towards? What was my one big goal? Was what I was doing now going to get me there at an acceptable rate? How could I even know if I couldn’t define it?
Having one goal in life is overrated, said Angie. Having a singular thing to go for in life works for some people, but if it’s not overwhelmingly clear to you what that thing is, trying to articulate something and structure your life to reach it means you’ll be at best stressed and at worst actively missing opportunities that don’t immediately seem like they’d lead you to that one thing, but very well may be pivotal for your overall development as a human / enjoyment of life / role to play in this world.
She didn’t have one thing she wanted to achieve. She wanted to have a full life—time for family and friends, financial security, professional fulfillment—but she didn’t task every decision she made with the responsibility of driving her towards every part of that life. She explained that she saw lilypads—opportunities—around her all the time, and she planned her route across them just one at a time. Each move taught her something about the next one, and her path, while maybe not one straight line, was fulfilling.
Applying this advice helped me decide leave that job I liked to travel for a year, and it helped me decide to extend that year and work on my writing. I don’t have to have the end game codified and mapped out, so long as the decisions I make are leading me to places I like and opportunities in line with my general goals and values. Which leads us to…
6. “Your marriage would buck under the pressure if you woke up, looked at your spouse every day, and asked yourself if you really wanted to be with that person”: evaluate big life decisions on a rolling, medium-term basis. — Brian, mentor & boss(’s boss)
This advice came to me secondhand—Brian told it to my boss, who told it to me—but that just proves how powerful it is. I heard it as a single person, and it clicked; now that I’m in a relationship, it rings even truer.
Asking any decision we make to hold up to the weight of constant scrutiny is not fair. It’s not a good way to judge the quality of the decision. There are days where we will hate our jobs or our significant others or the house we chose or the city we live in. There will be days we love them. Only by waiting for enough days to rack up and then evaluating them from a distance can we get any sense of the pattern of our reaction to them, of the impact they have on our life.
Brian’s advice coupled with Angie’s gave me my approach to all life-changing decisions: make them thinking of the next six months, and once those six months have passed, ask myself whether they’re by and large making me happy, then make any necessary changes and repeat. I do it every other quarterly check-in and it lets me live in the happy zone between constantly nitpicking my reality and ignoring problems ad infinitum. Ten out of ten type-A writers would recommend.
Go Forth & Prosper
Maybe this advice will help you. Maybe you knew it all before. Maybe I’ve unknowingly said something very wise to you at some point in our relationship like these people did for me. Maybe I haven’t, yet. Give me a chance later! I’m getting wiser every day!
xx KP