There is much to be learned from people that are more experienced than we are. However, it’s critical to not only listen with your ears, but also watch with your eyes, and think with your brain. What do I mean by this? Take in all of the information & recommendations that people give you, but then develop your own perspective – be a critical thinker.
Sometimes, the value you extract from the guidance of another person is self-evident – they may give you some objectively true recommendation, you may follow it, and benefit immediately. Other times, you have to read between the lines. For example, let’s say you’re starting your own business. A common statistic that you may hear from pessimists is, “Well, you know 9 out of 10 businesses fail.” If you were to take this statement at face value, you might be inclined to backtrack on starting a business at all. If you take a step back and unpack the comment, you may find it should be discarded.
Here are some of the questions I like to ask myself when I receive unsolicited advice:
1/ Does the person have any personal experience with this?
2/ If not, is the person speaking from an empirical place, or are they repeating common wisdom without validation?
3/ Does the person hold my best interests in mind?
4/ Could the person be projecting their insecurities onto the advice?
5/ How can unpack & investigate this claim further?
Take the ‘9 out of 10 businesses fail’ advice, for example. I used to run into this warning often when I became interested in leaving the corporate world. At first, it scared me – but after some time, I began to pick up on some patterns, and after some contemplation, I realized this common and often repeated ‘wisdom’ was a very loaded statement. Here are the observations I made:
1/ Successful entrepreneurs never warned me against this. Only people with desk jobs, or people who had tried to start their own business, and failed.
2/ The people who failed at starting their businesses generally had made glaringly apparent mistakes. Granted there will indeed be instances where it just doesn’t work out, but this figure is far lower than 90%.
3/ The person that would make these types of recommendations were often people that weren’t generally very supportive of my ideas.
4/ People that would make comments of these types were often those that seemed stuck in their own lives. Whether burdened by debt, stuck at a desk job, or unhappy with their family life, as the old saying goes, “Misery loves company.”
5/ Do your own research. In this case, validate the statistic. Do 9 out of 10 businesses really fail? If so, why do they fail? What are the most common mistakes people make in starting a business? How was the ‘9 out of 10’ statistic reached? Your takeaway from this single nonchalant recommendation could determine the course of your life, so don’t take it lightly.