Is Every Advice Useful?

Nowadays, we can get advice from anywhere and everywhere. It need not be from meeting someone in person but the digital world offers numerous other sources as well - blogs, videos, articles, forums. I myself read a lot of articles and I'm very fond of watching interviews. Over the course of time, I have found that we can even categorize advice. One set is absolute in nature in terms of how it applies universally to every person regardless of his or her current situation. Guiding someone on the importance of honesty or being kind to others. This is the behavior that each one of us would like to conform with.

The question that I raised in my post here is in the context of another set - which may work for some people but not for everyone. The same advice of following your heart and choosing a career that you feel passionate about may not be possible for someone who is really trying to make ends meet and so on. As another example - we all understand and read about the importance of perseverance. Keep trying, don't give up and eventually you'll succeed. But Albert Einstein also said: Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. 

So, right there, we saw an example of two pieces of advice. Each of them accurate in their own respect but if you place them next to each other, it makes you wonder. The first one is telling you not to quit until you succeed while the later also calls for re-assessing the feasibility of the goal in terms of your capacity and abilities. The second one may seem to be more practical, but the way I look at this is the following: If I only concentrate on the later one, the chances of quitting and giving up will become higher because mind does creates a sense of fear in struggling times. Confronted with some tough situation, we can easily create self-deflating thoughts and feelings of self-doubt. We can begin questioning ourselves about our abilities. 

I agree with both bits of advice. But to answer and respond to the sense of conflict, I try to balance them off. I have started to realize that everyone's capacity is different. A quality or habit may come naturally to someone while for some other people it may require significant amount of effort to cultivate it. If someone is really disturbed or hurt, the same advice that he or she would have nodded to may not be that easy to accept. Things can differ based on person's life's circumstances. 

My take on whether every bit of advice is useful and accurate is that in an ideal situation, yes it is. But that's not how life goes - ideal. So, I would think that as long as we are honest to ourselves, it is not wise to beat ourselves too hard in following some principle or advice only because at the core, we may know that it IS actually right but you do not have the capacity at the current moment at least to adopt it. Give yourself some time, decide which pieces to pick up at the current moment, make sure to revisit the ideas with a calm mindset and you will be able to resolve the conflicts in your mind clearly.

I wonder if you are going to buy my advice here?! :) Look at it as my opinion and I'd be happy to know yours. 

- Dippy