A different perspective.
We all have our shadows, of things we believe to be but hurt us .
When we need advice its usually about these topics. So the advice conflicts with our beliefs and we cannot act on them .
Since these beliefs are hidden (shadows) then we ha e feelings against the advice and we rationalize why its wrong.
In the proposed analysis, the answers are rationalizations of the feelings we have.
Why doesn't advice work?
81–90 of 334 posts
Re: Why doesn't advice work?
#82I think it's a pretty simple, and timeless, aspect of human nature: "People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others." - Blaise Pascal, 1670
I wonder if the problem is that, when you give someone advice, you're not giving them the whole thought-structure you've built that strongly implies the advice - you're just giving them the result. So they don't have any of the ideas that support the advice, just a blind aphorism. Maybe it would help to only give advice in long discussions where you show someone all the structure under the advice and then poke at it…
This is a theory of mine for which I haven't specifically looked into evidence, so take it with a grain of salt - but I'm convinced that this is why storytelling exists, and specifically why the Hero's journey is so common: stories are essentially beneficial viruses. They exploit our innate desire for discovery by packaging the information into a format that is interesting in the moment, and because we see someone else learning the lesson we are meant to learn, we feel as if we've discovered it ourselves.
This would also neatly explain why we discovered storytelling in the first place, and why so many story elements have changed little over thousands of years - stories "evolved" with us to become more and more effective at inoculating us against dangers which we can survive through our intellect.
Re: Why doesn't advice work?
#83The author uses rock climbing as an example. Notably, in most climbing circles there is an almost universally disliked personality type - someone who runs around a gym or outdoor climbing area shouting advice at climbers on routes. Most people find this annoying, distracting, and also it ruins the fun involved in figuring a problem out by yourself. Thus the rule to learn in climbing - if you want climbing friends and…
> the only advice worth giving is 'find another career where you're less likely to poison/maim yourself and your co-workers.' This tends to cause interpersonal conflict, so such people are often instead promoted into a position where they can do little harm.
I mean you say they should find another career where they're less likely to cause harm, and yet you're upset when they obtain a position where they can do little harm.
Re: Why doesn't advice work?
#84Unsolicited opinion is just noise. If someone wants advice, in addition to the conclusion, they need to hear the reasoning and contextual facts that make that advice useful and reliable.
Everyone knows that 95% of advice is opinion. So they filter it out. That's why almost all advice doesn't move the needle.
Re: Why doesn't advice work?
#85Unsolicited opinion is just noise. If someone wants advice, in addition to the conclusion, they need to hear the reasoning and contextual facts that make that advice useful and reliable. Everyone knows that 95% of advice is opinion. So they filter it out. That's why almost all advice doesn't move the needle.
100% of advice is opinion, but that doesnt mean it is bad. I heavily value the opinion of individuals I hold in high esteem.
Re: Why doesn't advice work?
#86"Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?
Yes, you say?
Try again.
Yes?
You’re probably deluding yourself.
You wouldn’t change.
Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?
This revelation unnerved many people in the audience last November at IBM’s “Global Innovation Outlook” conference. The company’s top executives had invited the most farsighted thinkers they knew from around the world to come together in New York and propose solutions to some really big problems. They started with the crisis in health care, an industry that consumes an astonishing $1.8 trillion a year in the United States alone, or 15% of gross domestic product. A dream team of experts took the stage, and you might have expected them to proclaim that breathtaking advances in science and technology — mapping the human genome and all that — held the long-awaited answers. That’s not what they said. They said that the root cause of the health crisis hasn’t changed for decades, and the medical establishment still couldn’t figure out what to do about it.
Dr. Raphael “Ray” Levey, founder of the Global Medical Forum, an annual summit meeting of leaders from every constituency in the health system, told the audience, “A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral.” That is, they’re sick because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of environmental or genetic factors beyond their control. Continued Levey: “Even as far back as when I was in medical school” — he enrolled at Harvard in 1955 — “many articles demonstrated that 80% of the health-care budget was consumed by five behavioral issues.” Levey didn’t bother to name them, but you don’t need an MD to guess what he was talking about: too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise."
...
"Reframing alone isn’t enough, of course. That’s where Dr. Ornish’s other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren’t eating everything they want, but they aren’t making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish’s tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. “These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator,” he says. “When people who have had so much chest pain that they can’t work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, ‘These are choices worth making.’ ” While it’s astonishing that most patients in Ornish’s demanding program stick with it, studies show that two-thirds of patients who are prescribed statin drugs (which are highly effective at cutting cholesterol) stop taking them within one year. What could possibly be a smaller or easier lifestyle change than popping a pill every day? But Ornish says patients stop taking the drug because it doesn’t actually make them feel any better. It doesn’t deal with causes of high cholesterol, such as obesity, that make people feel unhealthy. The paradox holds that big changes are easier than small ones. Research shows that this idea applies to the business realm as well. Bain & Co., the management consulting firm, studied 21 recent corporate transformations and found that most were “substantially completed” in only two years or less while none took more than three years. The means were drastic: In almost every case, the CEOs fired most of the top management. Almost always, the companies enjoyed quick, tangible results, and their stock prices rose 250% a year on average as they revived. IBM’s turnaround hinged on a radical shift in focus from selling computer hardware to providing “services,” which meant helping customers build and run their information-technology operations. This required a momentous cultural switch — IBMers would have to recommend that a client buy from competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft when it was in the client’s interest. But the radical shift worked: Services have grown into IBM’s core business and the key to its success. Of course, radical change often isn’t possible in business situations. Still, it’s always important to identify, achieve, and celebrate some quick, positive results for the vital emotional lifts that they provide. Harvard’s Kotter believes in the importance of “short-term wins” for companies, meaning “victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum. Without sufficient wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous, and meaningful to others, change efforts invariably run into serious problems."
via:
"FastCompany; By Alan Deutschman: Change or Die ; All leadership comes down to this: changing people’s behavior. Why is that so damn hard? Science offers some surprising new answers — and ways to do better."
Re: Why doesn't advice work?
#87I guess this is entirely tangential, but one of the stories in here resonated with me. I had much in common with a childhood friend. We bonded over similar interests in electronics, then video games, then computers in elementary school. He was definitely smarter than me when he could motivate himself to learn things. But in retrospect, I had dogged persistence on my side. As we moved past high school, I went into the…
Tough to change a persons nature, advise are like stock tips
I love good stock tips. I wish I got more of them.
Re: Why doesn't advice work?
#88Advice is useless. You don't have the context, or theories (see programming/everything as theory building) to make a good decision for someone else.
The only thing that works is sharing truth. When you don't know what else to do except share advice, make sure you spend a lot of time explaining the truths behind it.
Re: Why doesn't advice work?
#89> And for producers of advice: Step 0 I think should be "maybe don't give advice". You want to help, you think you're really good, you think it will improve things, but that's not how other people see it. They may seem like they need advice or seem like they are asking for it between the lines, but they just really want to unload or chit chat, or share some difficulty. The answer to that is sometimes to listen and no…
I was at a bakery grand opening from an uneducated rural family. Plenty of their rural friends listened to the difficulties, wished them the best. Bring in the MBA + Industrial Engineer, and tell them some advice on processes, economics, and as a bonus, I was an Electrical Engineer for a few years so I had some advice on their oven problem. What is better? The person that says "You look beautiful", or "You have a pie…
Sometimes I want to hear that I'm beautiful, even with the fuzz in my hair.
Re: Why doesn't advice work?
#90I’d be wary of following almost any romantic advice out there. People who are best qualified to give advice tend to give the least cause they know how little use there is in advice. This creates a scenario where the least useful advice is the most plenty because those with experience know that advice is useless.
So many people have had the luxury of being physically attractive, in the right place at the right time, an upbringing that got them into social circles that would match them properly, a work environment that has potential partners, or having the fortune of being in a college where they could meet their partner. So many of these types of individuals will act as if romance is effortless because it really was for them. They never needed to do anything because life worked out that way just due to sheer luck. These types of individuals will be completely useless for dating advice (but will make up the majority of advice giving) because they’ve never struggled for a moment and never had to think about what they’re doing right/wrong.