As someone who didn’t like giving or asking for advices, starting a blog where I’m sharing my ideas and opinions might seems like a contradiction, but as I said in the very first post of this blog I’m doing this for my own benefit. whenever I’m writing a new post I’m practically talking to myself, but if someone somehow finds it useful then that’s awesome, but its not my goal to tell people what to do I’m just sharing my thoughts from my humble experience.
I think I need to make things more clear when I say that I do not like advices. Don’t get me wrong I do believe that sometimes some types of advices works, I just think that most of “successful” people tend to believe that thier journey is completely replicable when in fact no one’s is. There’s so many examples of very successful people didn’t realize that they were doing the right thing until it eventually paid off and sometimes they don’t even comprehend how circumstances played in their advantage and how luck can actually determine a lot of your decisions in life. Therefore even when these advices come with good intentions they can lead to serious discouragement and disappointment when they don’t work out well.
No one know the secrets to success not even great successful people. The other day I was reading about Bayesian Statistics and found out that in fact Thomas Bayes who actually came up with the conditional probability equation which we now know as Bayes’s theorem one of the most important theorems in statistics (if not the most ) he never published it because he didn’t think it something of any value in fact it was published after his death and we have Thomas’s friend Richard Price to thank for that, he found it his apartment and arranged it for its posthumous publication (actually while writing this I found this so interesting that it deserves its own whole post). I also remember reading something similar about Franz Kafka the genius novelist who ordered his servant to burn all of his useless mediocre work (in his opinion) after his death, but luckily for humanity his servant didn’t listen to him. Some people just love asking for advices even on obvious things Goerge Hotz the founder of comma ai (a company that makes self driving cars computers) said this when he was asked about giving advices to this type ofpeople “I will write a self help book and charge 67$ for it then I’m going to write on the very first page of this book: ‘all of this advices are meaningless but you gonna be sucker and buy it anyway’” I loved his answer because sometimes people wants to be told advices just because it would make them feel better about themselves they’ll think just by seeking advices they’re already better people which is nice way to think about yourself I guess, but can be very misleading or even harmful on the long run.
I think the only type of advices you can actually give are either technical or very specific where you almost giving instructions. You can’t give advice for someone who asks “how can I learn X ?” I don’t know, Google it ? “how can I be good at Y” do it a lot maybe. These types of questions are annoying, I mean a lot of things in this life just kind of work out, you should stop wasting your time looking for advices and short cuts you’ll end up waste more time. If someone would ask me how i managed to get good exam score in a certain course I’d probably tell them to ware blue shirt on the day of the exam, because I remember doing better in exams when I ware blue shirts. This actually as relevant as telling them to study hard or telling them not to skip lectures. I think deep down they know exactly what they should do and what they are really after is the sense of reassurance that comes from people giving us advices because at the end what is an advice anyway? I like to define it as: the best guess to how thinks actually work out to best case scenario (or any good enough scenario that made people ask you for advices )” it’s basically like saying things will be fine if you do this which is something you just cann’t guarantee, “guess” is the keyword here you never know what really happened. I think you can actually tell a lot about people just by how comfortable they’re with saying “I don’t know”.
I have to admit that my view on this topic is bit exreme and biased maybe because of the many advices that were useless or because of all the times I did the oppiste of what I was told and things turned out very good. Maybe this whole post will be awkward if one I publish a book or give a talk at some event in which I’m baisclly telling people advices, but who knows maybe I look back at this post few years from now and I’ll feel proud that I changed the way I think about this. Finally if I had to give someone one piece of advice it would definitely be “do not listen to me”.
If I don’t publish another post next week I’ll probably wont for a long time even though I actually have some drafts for a few more posts but I’m expecting a busy schedule next month so maybe no new post till October.