A s a self-improvement junkie growing up in Asian culture, I always loved giving people advice even when I was not in their position or even when they did not ask for it. Asian culture emphasizes the importance of helping and sharing with other people. I thought that advice would help when I saw people struggling or in pain, that helping people unconditionally would be appreciated. None of that is, of course, wrong.
Giving advice can also make us feel as if we are a know-it-all, or at least know better than others do. In fact, giving advice increases our sense of personal power.
However, everything has two sides: good and bad. Here are the reasons why I stopped giving people advice:
Don’t give advice if you are not in their position.
Robert Kiyosaki’s father told him to go back to school and earn an MBA before starting up a business. Randi Zuckerberg was told to be less interesting in Silicon Valley. Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann was advised to be like someone else.
I had a hard time adapting to American culture when I first moved to the US. Feeling lost, I constantly reached out to a lot of people for advice. As much as I appreciate their help, I came to realize that the parameter of what worked for them was a failure for me. They have good intentions but simply don’t understand me, my situation, and how things work, and inevitably, get lost in the translation of what is the best for me.
These stories are entertaining, but they illustrate an important point: it’s impossible to give somebody good advice when you cannot get a full picture of theirs.
Even when you go to people who are qualified to give advice, it is no guarantee that they know what is right for you. Did you know that even the best world-class experts can be the worst teachers and advice-givers?
As Einstein’s biographer Walter Isaacson summarized, ”Einstein was never an inspired teacher, and his lectures tended to be regarded as disorganized.”
It’s because, according to a research conducted by Future Minds Lab at UNSW Sydney in 2019, “humans, including successful ones, are generally poor at identifying the factors that led them to where they are. They are, however, quite good at creating retrospective narratives that have little basics in reality. This lack of insight is often a consequence of the struggle to separate correlation from causation. Just because an activity, mindset, or strategy coincided with a successful outcome doesn’t mean it caused that outcome.”
In an article for The New York Times, organizational psychologist Adam Grant conducted multiple studies and research which revealed that because outliers and experts knew too much, and had mastered it too long ago, it’s hard for them to relate to your ignorance. As they get better and better at what they do, their ability to communicate their understanding or to help others learn often gets worse and worse. Most importantly, they were so naturally talented with all the resources available for them that they never had to learn the mechanics and principles that directed everything they did at their foundation. (Source: “Those who can do, can’t teach”, The New York Times.)
Most advice is people giving you their winning lottery ticket numbers. What may work for you may be utterly disastrous for someone. Giving people advice when you are not in their position or when you don’t have the knowledge needed will do more harm than good. It’s like the blind leading the blind.
Don’t give advice if they don’t want to be changed.
During my almost 4 years of a very blessed career in some of the best advertising agencies in Asia until now, I have seen a lot of failed advertising campaigns. In a study of media usage and ad exposure by Media Dynamics, Inc in 2014, on average, consumers are exposed to more than 5,000 advertisements per day. The fastest thing people do is reject brand messages. Part of the reason is that as humans, we all want to change others, but nobody wants to be changed. In an article on his blog, Eric Barker referenced studies done as far back as the 1940s by Kurt Lewin showed that lectures about why people should change their behavior were effective a measly 3% of the time. But when people self-generated reasons for the same activity, behavior change occurred 37% of the time. They reject the ideas they are given and act on ideas they feel they came up with themselves.
This is also the reason why among the five growth lanes that comprise a majority of new customer acquisition, content marketing, especially user-generated content (UGC), is the most efficient path for long-term and sustainable business growth. No one knows what consumers want more than themselves. In a May 2020 Sprout Social report, 30% of internet users wanted to see more UGC, and 41% of social media marketers planned on trying it out. A new consumer study by TurnTo Networks also shows that 90% of shoppers say UGC influences their decisions to make a purchase more than all other forms of marketing. Content marketing generally works because it’s the art of communicating with people without having to sell to them. It makes it the people’s decision that they want to change or do something. It doesn’t tell people what to do; they do it on their own.
Whether it was my friend, sister, co-worker, or anybody in my family, whenever I tried to give somebody advice, the conversations often ended up in arguments and debates. I figured out that giving advice is the easiest way to lose friends. When people reject advice, it’s not always because they disagree with it, sometimes it’s just because they don’t like the idea of being controlled by other people.
The number one thing to understand about influence is that people make decisions for their reasons, not yours. Seth Godin put it best when he said, “People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves.”
Don’t give advice if they don’t ask for it or don’t want to know it.
A powerful example for this comes from G. K. Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, as follows: “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” This heuristic is best known as being one of J. F. Kennedy’s favored sayings.
When people believe something must be true (or false), and if they don’t ask to be corrected, it’s because the outcome is something they like (or dislike). If something exists, there is likely a reason for it. Things do not appear out of nowhere, nor do people create them for no reason. We are all lazy by nature. Unless you know exactly why someone made a decision, you can’t safely change it. Behaviors generally evolve to serve an unfulfilled need. Attempting to remove the behavior without touching the underlying need does not eliminate it and can do more harm than good.
Here are other negative sides of giving unsolicited advice:
- It’s judgmental and disrespectful. It assumes you know it better than others.
- It raises the other person’s defensiveness when they are not ready to hear it.
- It ruins relationships and connections.
Don’t give advice if they are not open-minded enough to grasp a new concept.
Working with a range of brands for many years has exposed me to different sets of challenges where I’ve come to realize how much we like living in our little ideological bubbles. When I was a strategic planner and content marketer, together with my team, one of our goals was to end each day knowing that we did our best with everything that came our way every day — marketing strategies and content. And we slept well on the days when we knew that we added something to clients which also added to the bottom lines. Most of the time, however, we spent many hours coming up with ideas only to be rejected in the end because it contradicted our clients’ cherished beliefs, especially when they based their identity on believing in something. As a result, we made a lot of clients hate us because we often told them what did not fit with their existing ideas.
A study published in the ”Why facts don’t always change minds” that examined voting preference showed that introducing people to negative information about a political candidate that they favor often causes them to increase their support for that candidate.
Another study which examined misconceptions about politically-charged topics found that giving people accurate information about these topics often causes them to believe in their original misconception more strongly, in cases where the new information contradicts their preexisting beliefs. (Source: Why facts don’t always change minds, Effectiviology)
Sociologists call this the “Backfiring Effect” — a supercharged version of confirmation bias where being presented with evidence that goes against your beliefs makes you double down on your initial beliefs because you feel you’re being attacked, according to “100 Little Ideas” by Morgan Housel. When people see things and think one way, they will find difficulty communicating with and relating to people who see things another way. Imagine you had to describe what a horse looks like to someone who lacks a sense of vision.
The older I become, the more I realize giving advice is largely useless. Most people want confirmation, not correction. Until they want to seek knowledge after they have discovered their ignorance, there is no point in trying to prove someone wrong by giving advice.
So, make sure you think it over and consider multiple factors before you decide to give someone advice. Random acts of kindness can change someone’s life for the better, or the worse.
