March 5th, 2009

Good guys are just the guys who have priced themselves out of the market .... Well, I don't know about that actually; maybe it's not true. Never mind.

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It hit me this morning in the shower why advice—unasked-for advice—is so unpleasant and so unwelcome. (Note: I am not talking about openly-accepted and/or tacitly asked-for advice. There is a difference. I am talking about unasked-for advice.)

On the surface it appears to be a friendly helpful gesture: I see a problem that someone else is having, so I offer advice on how they can fix it or somehow mitigate it. And, certainly, people who are called out for offering unasked-for advice will look at you with their wide innocent eyes, and explain in a hurt tone of voice that they were only trying to help.

But about a millimetre deeper, the real reason for this unasked-for advice is a lot less friendly and helpful. There are two parts to why it is so unlikeable and annoying:

  1. Advice to someone else has an immediate message, sure, but the meta-message ... the real message is this: "You are doing something wrong. I know better than you."

  2. People who like to give unasked-for advice do it because they get a little lift from it. They want to feel good about themselves. They are willing to sacrifice other peoples' senses of self-worth in order to make themselves feel temporarily good about themselves.

There is something I learned, the hard way, when I was a teacher:

You can't teach anyone anything.

Oh, sure, people can learn whatever they are interested in, but just telling them something is the least efficient way for them to learn. Advice-givers don't seem to realise this, or at least don't seem to care (unasked-for advice is all about the giver, after all). People will learn their own way or they won't learn at all. But no external force can expedite that process. The most you can hope for is to encourage or somehow motivate people to want to learn. And spontaneously offering advice is no way to motivate someone.

You know, this is a really simple, basic tenet of human existence. It's sometimes called learning things "the hard way". What an irony that we have to learn the tenet itself "the hard way" :-)

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