A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to professionally give advice to people. Some listened, some didn't. Anyway, fast forward. My wife has been handling something for the last couple of years and has not listened to my advice once. Predictably, the matter has become a bigger and more expensive mess. A part of me really wants to yell, but for some inexplicable reason, I decided to put myself in her shoes. Focus: Do you listen and follow anyone else's advice? What about? Are there preconditions to following it in your head? In other words, what approach works for getting you to follow someone else's advice? Alt Focus: Has someone listened to your advice and it's gone horribly wrong? Did they blame you?
Depends on credibility. I'll take nutritional and health advice from a guy I know that graduated from Harvard Medical School versus my aunt who watches Dr. Oz and used to hawk HerbaLife supplements, thinking it was a legitimate enterprise. I'll usually follow my dad's advice on business matters and how I should approach work-related things. I would never have that conversation with my mom. Alternatively, I would talk to my mom about what to get FutureWife for Christmas or her birthday, my dad would tell me to get her nothing because birthdays are silly. I think people dont generally take advice because they are most interested in validating their own ideas instead of receiving feedback.
I could go on about this for hours as someone who gives advice professionally to this day. Remember, no matter how many degrees, years of practice, training, or math, someone's random uncle will always somehow know better than you. Anywhoo, for me to listen to advice I will basically assess those qualities and compare them to my own. Are you a carpenter? I know nothing about building things so I will listen to your advice. If the matter is important or expensive, I will probably do more research which will cause me to come back with additional questions. But if your explanations make sense and you have credibility, done and done.
Focus: Echoing Juice, it mostly depends on credibility and trust. What's his/her education, background and past experience? Do they have any interest or obligation personally, ethically or financially to give me sound advice? My husband and I ask my dad advice about finances and investing. I ask seasoned co-workers' advice regarding difficult or complicated situations. For me, the best approach is to say something along the lines of, "I have a bit of experience with X. If you ever need or want any advice let me know." I'm more likely to talk to them, and I usually don't appreciate unsolicited advice. It's actually one of my pet peeves. Any time there's been a life change people come out of the woodwork with all sorts of gems about "what worked for them" or "what I should do". There are very few people who can approach me with this and receive more than obligatory, "OK thanks! I'll keep it in mind!" I'm not even close to being knocked up, and the stream of advice is already flowing from co-workers, friends, in-laws and my obgyn. Granted, I don't talk about having kids or getting pregnant because it's not on my radar. It's just because I got married last year. Surely this is the next step and the only thing I'm thinking about right now! Nothing else matters in life other than procreating! Yay babies!
I dealt with something kind of like this just today. Every couple of weeks we hold a regional, early morning, developer meetup, and this morning one of the more egotistical developers was asking about how to capture and report on business intelligence (BI), more along the lines of infrastructure and process. He started off by saying he knows nothing about it, and asked if anyone had any insight. It should be noted that this guy constantly deals with very simple problems that require very simplistic solutions, so discounts anything remotely complex or difficult as being "unreasonable" or "preposterous" or "not relevant". I was more than happy to help out, and yet this guy gives me attitude... as in all the projects I've worked on at big scale somehow don't apply to shitty little startup scale. I mapped out a simple process/architecture for the BI collection that I've used many times in the past, data translation/processing, and reporting, gave him the open source tool names for each, and explained it fairly completely to him. Basically gave him the cocktail napkin blueprint on how to accomplish what he needs to do, along with the pointers to specific solutions for each step. His response was, "we don't have the resources or time to build that out", to which I said, "I did this for our company in 3 days, you could do it in a week, or 2 at the very outside". He didn't believe me, so I grabbed my cell and called up an good friend of mine, who happens to be a Director of BI at EA. "Hey, Swede... Nett here... you're on speaker..." "Hehe... OK... what's up?" "What's your role?" "Director of BI at EA" "What collecting/reporting framework/architecture are you using for that?" "The one you and I built on [online game project]" "How long did it take us to do the initial working build?" "2 weeks... maybe a bit less." "How hard was it to build out?" "Pretty easy after we had the overall design and process." "And today, 4 years later?" "Still going strong, and we're building on it continuously, and it's our global de facto standard right now." "Thanks... ttyl". "So please, tell me again how I was wrong, or show me something similar you've built... but don't tell me I'm wrong about something you know nothing about or have no experience with and are actively asking for help on." Needless to say the meeting got a little bit uncomfortable at that point and a few of us left. Seeing as half the guys at the meeting work for me, there was some laughing at our morning developer's stand-up. So yeah, it pisses me off how people who know nothing about some subject proceed to tell you, a subject matter expert, how you're wrong. The narcissism that is involved in assuming your opinion matters when you admit to knowing nothing on the subject is staggering, and I refuse to treat that shit politely any more. Fuck them. You don't get to have an opinion in the matter. Period. /end rant
I work in an industrial environment. Some guys are educated--like journeymen-- who know what they're doing because they put in years of school and supervised field work to get to where they are. I trust their opinions on things over any form of supervisor I have. On the other hand you have my recent ex co-worker Mark who insisted he could speed up the production line by simply "re-wiring the logic controller" (a giant, complex computer glistening with thousands of wires and sensors). ...THIS is a person of whom you ignore advice. What the fuck does that even mean? Re-wiring what, exactly? You're going to fuck around with a dangerous, specifically programmed computer and that will somehow make the machinery run and cut faster? Let me fill a mug of root beer, let's sit down and you can teach me this miracle formula. Idiot. Little does he know if he touched the wrong part of the logic controller he would be killed while still in his feet. I'm not sure why you'd choose to be full of shit when it came to something dangerous. I believe trusting the educated and experienced usually rolls in your favour. Especially involving technical, hands-on fields.
I know we have a few teachers on this board who can relate when I say how much I love it when encounter a parent who is abso-fucking-lutely convinced they are in a position to give me (or one of my co-workers) advice because they read a book/an article online/saw something someone shared on facebook once. You know what, ma'am? You're a bank teller, this is your first child, and we've been getting paid for longer than you've been alive to un-teach johnny to say words like "fuck" and "god damnit" that he learned from you. While you're at it, stop slapping your husband's ass around your child because he's doing it to other kids now. Thanks. As far as me giving advice, I only do it obviously only when it is asked for or clearly necessary, and even then only when I have a high degree of certainty as to how the recipient is gonna take my advice. Sometimes people ask questions and don't want to know the answer, and if you're qualified and they know it, it only makes it that much worse. When possible under circumstances where I know it will be poorly received, I usually just give a non-answer.
I'll listen very closely to advice on personal stuff from a select few people in my life who aren't complete morons, and usually end up realizing they're right if it's a situation that I'm too close to see clearly. For other things, like a lot of you, I rely on experience and expertise. If something seems not quite right to me, I turn to peer reviewed science if it exists because I have an academic background. I deal with this a lot working in agriculture. Lots of people have a FB opinion who have never visited a farm, or been anywhere close to food production, but have watched a completely biased documentary and read some random news article on the internet, so now they are experts who "just know" things. I try not to talk about it too much unless asked because the conversation often gets emotional and angry very, very quickly, and most of the time they aren't interested in the real answer anyways.