Who Should You Listen to? | The Probabilist . com

Who Should You Listen to? January 17, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Communication, Society, Personal Growth, Productivity, Relationships, Abilities, Leadership , trackback

When it comes to advice, some are phenomenal, some are plain bad and the bulk of them everywhere in between. Most of the time there’s a subconscious, automated gut feeling that tells you whether a piece of advice is more of the productive or the destructive sort. But when you’re swimming in uncharted waters of information flow, there’s little in the way of knowing what genuinely helps and improves you in the subject and what lulls you into being another sucker giving away your resources in vain.

The first prerequisite for expanding your knowledge is definitely leaving the know-it-all attitude behind. Whether you consciously identify yourself with or without it and whether the subject is one that you know nothing or lots about, it’s always good to remind yourself that what you currently think you know about something, may in fact be blocking you from applying new understanding beyond your current magnitude, perspective or methodology of the given issue. As an old Zen story goes “You have to empty your own cup of knowledge before somebody can pour new, refreshing content in it.” Therefore, the first step is to actually listen.

Moving on to who you should listen to, the answer is simple. Everyone. I’ve gotten lots of great advice on what I shouldn’t do simply by listening to the calamities that resulted from poor decisions. And given that these people don’t feel embarrassed about the choices they’ve made, they want to let you know. Poor people talk about misfortunes because they feel victimized. Accordingly, they say the world is against them and they want sympathy for their helplessness. Prosperous people tell you because their mistakes plunged them into learning from the mistakes that served as triggers to enhance their internal locus of control.

The following step is therefore to ask questions - lots of them. As I wrote in an earlier entry, asking questions is a skill worth improving. The benefit is of course that you’ll get better and better at asking the right questions, the ones that pinpoint exactly what you want and need to know. Additionally, you’ll become prudent enough to tell who has the most knowledge and experience within a field that you need to inquire about further.

There’s a simple, four-word phrase that you can use every single time you find yourself perplexed over something totally new to you that somebody is trying to more or less force upon you - Will you guarantee it? Ask that question every single time somebody tries to sell you mutual funds, a new weight-loss program, info products and any new, better, improved widget of your choice. Anyone coming to an halt when you give those four penetrating words as a counter attack isn’t serving your best interest. Why? Because they don’t seem to practice what they preach. Besides, what works for them isn’t guaranteed to work for you.

Another great way to assess the applicability, productivity, usefulness and ease of a piece of advice is to look how well that information is treating its source. In other words, you may want to do exactly the opposite of what a broke, sick and ignorant person is telling you. If they’re whining about their misfortune, they’re telling you not to whine. If they feel powerless to do something about it, they’re telling you to become empowered to take action. And if they want to indulge themselves in feeling pride over being the little man fighting the rest of the evil corporate and capitalist society and government, then they’re telling you to be humble, caring and giving as you think of the human nature as inherently good.

You’ll get quite far simply by asking questions, listening and being critical only within your own mind. At a given point you’ll feel so comfortable about your understanding of any given issue that you want to share it with others. Every now and then you might get knocked down by know-it-alls who know better than you and this will remind you only to give your opinion when asked for. Trying to force something onto others isn’t the answer no matter how helpful it would be to the recipient. It just won’t work. Leading by example on the other hand will awaken more and more people to start using the advice in this article to learn from you.

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1. SuccessJolt » Blog Archive » Carnival of Success #14 - March 2, 2007: […] Holmberg presents Who Should You Listen to? posted at The Probabilist . […]