Advice & Why No-one Cares

Good advice comes from the benefit of experience. Experience, is the biggest teacher of all. And experience takes time.

I’m the sort of person that loves to learn. I want to make my life better and the life of those around me better too. What I’ve realised more and more however, is most people don’t care about what I have got to say. Nor for that matter do they care about what others have to say either!

You can hit them with every fact, every bit of proof, say everything objectively and it matters not.

All my advice is always backed up not only by experience, but by evidence if required – tangible facts, yet when faced with it, people will do as they like, as they see best. They will learn, if they want to learn at all, in their own way and in their own time.

And as with most things in life there’s a beauty to that. You can’t push it or force it.

Learning is happening.

But there’s also a sadness to it too. You see people doing things that are going to harm them and others around them. You see them walking into traps and mistakes that will effect them for the rest of their lives. You plead and plead for them to see sense, but they simply can’t or won’t.

But I’ve done it too. Yet I’ve learned when I’ve gone through suffering. And for myself, a lot of suffering has become a catalyst to learn something that’s made me a better person.

For example, chasing material, living without God, over indulging in alcohol and drugs, being dishonest, being violent, disrespecting those that look after me, not exercising and eating harmful foods in excess. I’ve done all these and suffered as a result. But I had to learn myself.

Ultimately, you must take people as they find them. People may or may not learn over time. But once you’ve said all you’ve got to say, (and tried to do it calmly and patiently too) you’ve really done your job. You risk getting dismissed, attacked, ridiculed, but you know your intentions in your heart and that’s all you can do.

Sometimes it’s true too the best advice is given when you act, rather than talk.

The best ‘advice’ often teaches people there are consequences to their actions. Those consequences may come from you, or they may simply come from reality – e.g. consequences of their actions to them or others.

Great advice may come when you do something that might be hard. It might cause a lot of suffering for you and others in the short term. But in the long term, you know what you’ve had to do is going to be better for you and for them as well.

Good advice, good action then, has the long term well being of everyone at heart. Even if they don’t understand it at the time.

And it might mean you lose someone or something very dear to you in the process.

So all in all, the best advice there is, is action, because action effects people’s experiences. It’s from these experiences that people really learn because they always deeply effect something at the centre of their life – them.