3 pieces of advice you never need to hear

We take medicine to cure our illness. However, if you take any medicine, the side effects will be greater. So, a doctor who is an expert who can understand my disease is diagnosed with the name of the disease and prescribed the appropriate medicine. And buy the medicine from a pharmacist who specializes in medicine. Advice is actually a lot like medicine. Advice is a kind of remedy for bad situations. Like medicine, when applied correctly, it can be of great help, but taking the wrong advice and putting it into practice can actually make things worse. For example, the following advice should never be taken lightly, as it is very likely to make things worse.

Advice from someone who doesn’t know your situation

First of all, needing advice means that there is a problem with the current situation. No problem is ever simple. Each problem has a context and is organically connected to the surrounding situation. So, in order to give advice on a problem, you must first understand the situation. However, there are many cases where advice is given only by looking at a very local part rather than grasping the overall situation. One of the most requested consultations for me is about my career path. When I hear about my career path, I first ask the other person about their parents’ financial status. Your options will vary greatly depending on your parents’ financial situation. If your parents can support you financially, you can make more risky choices. However, if you are in a situation where you have to attend your parents right away, your options will be reduced. Because problems are always complex, advice given by someone unfamiliar with your situation is unlikely to be helpful.

A vague affirmation that everything will be alright

One of the worst pieces of advice is advice based on vague affirmations that you don’t have to worry. In fact, this is not advice, but consolation. However, there are no concrete proposals, and there are more people than I thought who only talk about attitude or mental strength. It’s common sense, not advice, that you should have a positive attitude even in difficult situations. A good piece of advice is to look at the situation coolly and objectively. In particular, it would be of great help if the person concerned could be more specific about the cost of failure, which is difficult to calculate based on emotional thinking. Conversely, if you talk about failure, there is no big problem even if you don’t listen to the advice of people who say that you are unlucky and cheat.

Unsubstantiated Advice

Advice is a kind of argument. A good argument must be supported by solid evidence. Advice should never be accepted unconditionally. If someone gives you any advice, you should politely ask why you think that way. This is the story of my college days. I had already studied in the United States for a year as an exchange student, and a junior applied for an exchange student in the United States, but it was all gone. I told that junior to apply again to Denmark or Sweden. When thinking of going for an exchange student, most people think of the United States to study in an English-speaking country, but my thoughts were different. First of all, most Northern Europeans speak English well and have a lot of English. And the Swedish and Danish friends I met as exchange students were relatively more cultured and intelligent than my American friends. And lesser-known, even under-applicable universities in Sweden and Denmark outperformed their fiercely competitive US universities in the world school rankings. It was a strange phenomenon that happened because we had relatively little knowledge about Europe. In the end, my junior went to Denmark as an exchange student, and after returning, he thanked me for saying it was the best experience of his life. If I go back to being an undergraduate and apply for the exchange student program, I will ask “why?” to people who tell me that I should go to the US.

I didn’t make that mistake when I went to graduate school. I received many acceptance notifications from good universities in the US, but a good offer came from the National University of Singapore. Some professors advised that I should go to the United States to study unconditionally, saying that it was an absurd idea, but there was no clear basis for that advice. He had only his shallow experiences and feelings. So, I personally visited the National University of Singapore, talked with the professors, and checked out the research facilities. After seeking advice from mentors I really trusted, I received my PhD in Singapore, not the United States. I am still proud that I rejected such unfounded advice, met the best academic advisor, and received an excellent education in the best research environment.