Asking for, taking, and dishing out advice are three very different practices that hold their own difficulties for all of us.
It is often said that the advice we give out to other people is the advice we most likely need to take ourselves. It’s easy to throw our words around, vaguely connecting experiences with results in a round-about attempt to find meaning from something, but it’s a hell of a lot harder to ask for that advice in the first place – or to even take it later down the line.
Recently I’ve been reading up a lot on the idea of ‘mentors’ and looking up to influential people I admire.
When it comes to taking advice from people (something we rarely do, but when we do) you have to be damn sure that they’re either in a position you want to be in, or they’re proactively working their way towards it.
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The weight on your shoulders in bigger than you think.
People are looking for you to succeed. They are looking for proof that you can be amazing so they can be amazing too. However much their words say otherwise, they’re secretly willing you along.
Sure, chances are they won’t pick up on their own opportunities, but so long as you give them hope, the hope that “I can do it, so you can do it too” they’ll follow along with you all day long.
That’s why whenever we want to do anything nowadays, the first thing we do is search online for other people who have done that thing before us. And we find hundreds of examples. We’ll go to their blog, follow them on Twitter, like their Facebook page, and watch their journey as they continue to do what we want to do.
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I was flicking through my notebook the other day (for real, though to see it written down I can appreciate how pretentious that sounds) when I came across these scribbled words by my friend Amber.
In any pursuit we have, there is…
a) What we want.
b) What we think is possible.
When you ask people “What do you want to do with your life?” they automatically filter it through what they think is possible instead of thinking about it as two separate questions.
The larger the delta between what we want and what we think is possible, the more unhappy we are as people.
If you were to ask a small boy what he wants to be when he grows up, he’ll give you the most exciting answer in the world. He wants to be an astronaut. For him, there’s no filter. He will give you an honest answer to an honest question, and in that moment in time, he means it more than anything else in the world.
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It’s fair to say I’ve never been massively into charity. I remember popping down to my local post office at the start of 2005 to hand over a crisp £10 note to the cashier to put towards the boxing day tsunami relief efforts, but besides from that, I’ve never be accused of being much of a giver.
I recently watched this video interview with Scott Harrison, the CEO and founder of charity: water. It blew me away. From the ages of 18-28 Scott was a club promoter in NYC, living the dreams of many (and doing the drugs, of many). Two years later, aged 30, he founded charity: water. I won’t give away any more of the story, as it genuinely is nothing less than the most humbling and inspirational story I’ve heard in a long time, but I urge you to watch the interview.
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Remember me? The one with the hair and the face and the… no, you’re thinking of Ryan Gosling. You’re close mind, damn close.
It’s been a while. It’s fair to say this post is mainly intended for those you who have been reading my work for a while, or who know me personally, as it’ll probably bore anybody else. Not that I’m promising it won’t bore the first two groups, but it’s always advisable to have all your bases covered.
So what have I been up to in the month and a half since my last personal update?
Honestly, my priories have been in a rut. Far apart from not being able to focus on what I needed to do next, I simply couldn’t decide on what that was. It’s amazing how you can convince yourself of something so strongly that you veer off down a solid path without ever really looking back to question your decision or wonder if what you’re doing is in fact what you really want to do.
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All too often we believe respect is something that needs to be earned through a hierarchical ladder.
As we make our way up the ladder, leveling up year on year, we gain another ounce of respect. The higher we are up this ladder, the more we expect the people below us to look up to us (they are, after all, below you).
This is most commonly true, in my experience (albeit mostly a passive one), in office culture. The higher you are up the corporate ladder, the more respect you expect to feel beaming your way from colleagues laying at your feet. And often you feel like you deserve it, after all you were treated the same way by your superiors when you were in their position.
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Three years ago I was sat on the London Underground (the overground part) making my way home from a long day at university.
I was stuck. I was trapped within a blanket of choices. You see, I was soon to leave university. I was soon to make my way out into the big wide world, and I had no idea what I wanted to do.
I felt a buzz in my pocket. I looked down, pulled out my phone, and opened an email from a friend (overground part, remember).
I had emailed her the day before, pouring my first world problems onto her like Lohan in rehab. I read through the long email on my teeny-tiny screen, finally reading the part about choices.
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I looked over at a former classmate, weeping into his envelope while leaning against a cold stone wall.
“Looks like somebody didn’t get into college”, my friend gleefully said to me, noticing my gaze. “Serves him right”, he continued, “He did less work than any of us”.
I looked down at my own envelope. Despite my friends somewhat cold-hearted remarks, they were said out of a deep fear of what we, and all the other people around us were about to do.
On the count of three, we opened our envelopes.
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It’s unbelievably humbling how quickly we get used to things.
If you’ve been reading my posts over the past month you will know just under a couple of weeks ago I relocated from the busy streets of London to the high altitudes of Granada, Spain.
I had plenty of freak-outs along the way, but now, less than two weeks in, I’ve become incredibly used to everything around me.
The weekend just gone I visited the Carnaval de Cádiz on the Andalusian coast with students of Granada University. As our bus slowly rolled back into Granada at 8:30 on Sunday morning, I looked out the window upon the yellow streets and mountains in the distance and felt like I’d arrived back home.
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A couple of years ago while reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell I was struck by the ideas in one of chapters.
In short, Gladwell spoke of how a strong Korean cultural hierarchy contributed to Korean Air having more plane crashes than any other airline in the world at the end of the 1990s.
Now this wasn’t, as he points out, due to issues you may expect, such as low quality planes or badly trained pilots. This was due to co-pilots being too scared (read: respectful) to speak up when they they felt the pilot had made a wrong move or hadn’t noticed a warning light come on.
This story came back into my conscious again recently while reading an incredibly long 5,000 word post by Julien Smith, a bestselling author of two books (I’ve not read the first, but I can firmly recommend the second).
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