Additionally, advice between peers, advice that doesn't come from the master to the student, and I think this is the most common sort of advice, life-advice, or "how to live" advice, is always patronizing. There's an implicit assumption (and lie) that the other person knows better, taken to its extreme, it means the other person can think, you can't think; the other person knows what's good, you don't know what's good; the other person has the motivation, you don't have the motivation. Sure, the advice giver "means well" so they can't be faulted, the receiver has to appreciate the advice no matter how useless and the advice giver never has any responsibility, certainly not the responsibility of any consequences of their advice, that's always the receiver's responsibility.
I suggest a good way to “give advice” is Socratic. Listen. Have them describe their views. Ask clarifying questions.<p>Even if you have the best advice in the world, it’ll be useless if it’s not what the listener needs to hear at that moment.<p>Might be better to just help them better understand their current perspectives and options. Then they’ll be more open to finding solutions themselves.
Giving advice is like trying to inject lines of code in a neural network instead of giving training examples to it. Nothing good is going happen. I prefer to share experiences and let people to do whatever they want with that information
This reminds me of a story I heard from Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway about asking Mozart for advice.<p>One man came to Mozart and asked him how to write a symphony. Mozart replied, “You are too young to write a symphony.” The man said, “You were writing symphonies when you were 10 years of age, and I am 21.” Mozart said, “Yes, but I didn’t run around asking people how to do it.”
I've completely given up on giving advice and persuading people because it doesn't work and often people do the opposite. People are going to do what they want anyway. Doesn't stop me having my opinions though.