3 Life Advice That Does More Harm Than Good
Not every piece of advice is good for you.
These three pieces of advice that I took seriously.
I tried them for a quite long time before realizing that they were ultimately bad advice, or I interpreted them in a bad way and ended up doing something more destructive than positive in my life.
So, let’s get into them.
You’re an Average of 5 People
Now, there isn’t a whole lot to object to with this quotation because we are influenced by the people, we spend the most time around.
Now, the people you watch or consume content of can also influence you. So, choose wisely.
Its obvious people are the average of their friends, their family, or the people that they tend to hang out with.
If I’m an ambitious person, if have a lot of goals and I want to be successful, then I have to ditch everyone in my life who doesn’t operate in the same way that I do.
I need to stop being friends with those people immediately and go find new friends who are going to be a lot more ambitious.
I really don’t like this piece of advice.
When I was younger, I thought this as well. Luckily, I didn’t end up ditching my friends but there were times when I was thinking to myself.
Maybe I need to find a different friend group.
You don’t have to be on the same ambition wavelength as your friends to be friends with them.
Your friendships are separate from your work and your goals and ambitions. But make sure you are spending some of your time surrounding yourself with people who do build you up.
If we all took this literally, I’ve to be around five people who I admire the most. We would all only look upwards.
We would constantly be ignoring the people who probably need us and trying to chase people who we think we need.
We should be thinking in both directions.
Be Everywhere
It seems like a really good piece of advice, especially if you want to get your name out into the world.
When I heard this piece of advice, it was in the context of how to build a successful blog, or how to create a successful online audience.
If you’re everywhere if you’re on Medium, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube and commenting on other blogs and all kinds of stuff.
Then there are so many different opportunities for people to find out who you are. But it’s the way in which you interpret this advice that makes difference.
The way I interpreted was destructive because I took being everywhere as a call for me to be active on every platform all the time.
Now, there is a quote that I do want to share here,
If you don’t want anything to do with it, stay in your basement — Ben Folds
I think we need to take the majority of our time and use it to focus on creating something that is really worth paying attention to or honing our skills.
If you’re splitting your time up into little chunks every single day trying to be active on all these platforms, you don’t have any time left over to do something that’s worth sharing.
So, focus on that first.
Focus on Your Strengths
This is something that can be interpreted in a positive way. If you know what your strengths are.
Unfortunately, this advice is given to those who are just starting out or sometimes when you haven’t put in enough work.
Something that you’re just in the dip right now and you haven’t the kind of come out of that initial area of difficulty that almost nobody makes it out of.
So for example, a lot of people in the world say, “I’m bad at math” or “I’m not good at learning languages”.
So I think a better way to go about this is to follow your interests.
If you’re interested in something, be it speaking Chinese or learning Algebra put ample time into the practice of whatever that thing is.
Now, you may realize down the line that yes, this is a weakness of mine.
I think more times than not, you are going to discover that what you thought was a weakness, was just something that is inherently difficult to learn for a lot of different people.
It just requires work.
