Day 10: The Best Advice I've Ever Received/Heard

The best advice… ever?

We live in the age of information overload, and that includes lots of advice on how to live better, eat better, work better, exercise better and be better. Which is why choosing the piece of advice that’s the best I’ve ever heard is really tough.

I’m sure that, over the course of my whole life, nobody has guided me as adeptly as my parents. But it’s hard to track down just one piece of advice they’ve given to me.

So, I’m going to go with good ol’ reliable Oprah – or as my favourite aunt used to say, awww-pra.

In her final episode speech, Oprah said:

“…what I want you to know is each of you has your own platform. Do not let the trappings here fool you. Mine is a stage on a studio. Wherever you are, that is your platform, your stage, your circle of influence. That is your talk show and that is where your power lies.

Everybody has a calling, mine aligned with my profession, my job. Not everybody gets paid for it, but everybody gets called…My great wish for all of you who've allowed me to honor my calling is you carry whatever you're supposed to be doing forward. Don't waste anymore time. Use your light to serve the world."

This excerpt from her speech stuck with me, and what I took from it is:

We can’t all be rock stars, celebrities, leaders of massive corporations or indeed, talk show hosts, and that's okay. We’ve come to see success as only these glamorous things, and everything else as inferior. But farmers still need to plant us food, bus drivers are still needed to transport others to and from work and someone still needs to make sure the Hectic Nine-9 website is up to date. There is enjoyment – and purpose – in virtually every human activity. Find yours, and if that’s where you feel you contribute best, stick with it.

Some people are better followers than leaders. As much as entrepreneurship as a concept is vital and important, not all of us want to take over the world or constantly innovate. Some of us find great joy in creating, not overseeing the creation of things. Can you envision a world full of presidents and managers? I can’t, and I don’t want to. We need to remind ourselves that the things we do well represent a weakness in another.

Oprah recognized that there are countless ways to serve our world, and one is not better than the next, it’s merely different. So, in whichever way you choose, serve the world and find your platform. And if it isn’t on a stage beneath a spotlight, but it’s on a platform where you feel comfortable and happy, stay where you are, because there are lots of people still searching for theirs.

DEAR SOCIAL MEDIA, STOP BEING SO HELPFUL, I’M FINE

It’s 2014 and we’re being egged on and motivated to do more, more than ever before, without asking for it. But a surplus of motivational talk may just be leaving us cold.

It’s been discussed ad nauseam; we live in an age of relative information overload, and we can’t really escape it. Whereas searching for information just over a decade and a half ago involved scouring through a thesaurus or book of some sort and absorbing information at a somewhat digestible rate, today we are slapped with a sea of material on arbitrary and fascinating topics alike.

The very same goes for the advice and encouragement we receive from friends, family and complete strangers, often indirectly. In the past, we were more often encouraged and motivated face-to-face, once we had reached an emotional zone comfortable enough to share a problem. This would then elicit some kind of a motivational response from whomever we had chosen to confide in.

But today, we are confronted with a never-ending stream of quotes, articles and self-help blurbs without asking for them – and in fact without even necessarily needing them. This has produced – from my viewpoint, at least – a rather unpleasant emotional response. You see, the kneejerk reaction to a piece of advice is that we absolutely need to listen up, take note, and apply. After all, we all want to keep improving our lives and make conscious adjustments which will engender happier states of being.

The counter effect is that all these helpful articles and this need to play ‘philosopher’, when grouped together as a mass of information, are showing us all the ways we’re not doing things as well as we theoretically could be. We seem to have become oddly obsessed with quite blatantly telling each other to work harder, take on a new hobby, find a new line of work, not take the small stuff for granted, remove the ‘negative people’ in our lives (a particularly popular one, this), and so many other bits and pieces of essential guidance that I believe we’re only succeeding at demotivating each other. Sure, the intentions are good - to support each other and help each other grow, but people did this far more self-sufficiently once upon a time.

Several studies have been published which point to the unhappiness so many feel when scrolling through a typical Facebook news feed. One friend’s night out on the town, another’s visit to the zoo and a cousin’s wedding day all form the rather unrealistic impression that others are living more thrilling lives than your own.

Similarly, three motivational articles in one browsing session are enough to leave one wondering where on earth to begin your self-improvement journey? It’s akin to Googling two classic flu symptoms, and ending up diagnosing yourself with stage 3 pancreatic cancer; the perception we’re left with is of an urgency that doesn’t match up to the reality.

What do we take away from all of this? Well, we are simply being fed more information than our internal processors can cope with. It’s so important to take much of what we consume online with a pinch of salt – every now and then, yes, it feels good to really invest in that special, well-written article. It’s inspiring. It offers a refreshing perspective on life. But most of the time, you were just fine before reading it.

We need to live life on our own terms. One would think doing exactly what you want is easy, but it’s in fact a real battle when an excess of information is ‘guiding’ you in a series of other apparently ‘better’ directions.

Be your own self-help guide, and when that fails, call up a friend – most of the time, you’ll find out that you were only exaggerating to begin with and that your life, in truth, is just as it should be.