We’ve all been given a bit of advice from friends and family that sounds good on its face. But whether by choice or happenstance, you didn’t take it. And yet the sky didn’t fall. In fact, maybe even the heavens opened up for you. So now whenever you hear that gem of conventional wisdom being passed around, you kind of roll your eyes.
For me, it’s “Do what you love”. Fortunately for me, no one told me this when I was growing up. If they had I would still be floundering in school. There were things that I liked about my undergraduate major and area of study in graduate school. I definitely had my fixations. But passion? Nope, I never felt anything like it. It took me almost ten years into my career for me to be able to identify something I love about it. Love is a wonderful bonus. But pursuing it above everything else, especially finances? I think this is dumb. I really wish people would stop selling this tripe to impressionable youngsters.
I never got a lot of “conventional wisdom” really… and what little I did get was usually fairly sound.
There ought to be a distinction between “Do what you love” and “Follow your dreams”, because the first is basically advice to choose something you love over something that you don’t love, but that’s lucrative, and the second is advice to potentially act like a dumbass in the face of all evidence to the contrary. For example, doing what you love may mean that you stay a programmer instead of moving into management, while following ones dreams may mean that you act like a knucklehead and try to be a rock star when you’re 22, and end up managing a Taco Bell by the time you’re 45 instead of going to college and building a better career foundation.
But yeah, the “do what you love*” comment was always kind of frustrating for me. Not because it led me to waste my life tilting at windmills or something, but because it dangles the promise that if you can only find that career/job that you love, then everything else will fall into place for you. It’s not necessarily that easy; often doing what you love isn’t the fast-track to success, even if it may be the fast track to personal happiness, and it often takes a certain amount of experience and perspective to appreciate that.
So I’m sure there are a lot of discontented people out there doing what they love in the sense I’m talking about, and who don’t have the experience or perspective to realize that they’re happier that way.
“Buying used means getting someone else’s problems.”
Cars, electronics, clothes, cookware.
I always shop around and am sure to check CraigsList and Ebay before buying a big ticket item. Never been burned!
At one point, I received a lot of advice to “not get involved” into a project at work, which I had accepted with alacrity. Seriously: the factory manager was only halfway through her sales pitch and I was telling myself “let her finish, don’t jump on the table and yell ‘yes!’”. People who didn’t even know the project meant a pay cut were telling me I was “sticking my neck out”, or that “a bird in hand”, or that I was making my boss look bad (he didn’t take the project because it involved travel, thinking about the future and computers, and he hates all three).
I wouldn’t have my current job without that project.
I’d joined that company at the same time as another woman a bit younger than me and with similar qualifications. We were both underemployed as lab techs (the job requirements called for trade school, we had college degrees). A coworker with a mean streak several miles wide advised both of us that we “shouldn’t go above our station” and also that we should limit ourselves to doing what the job description said: if the boss gave us some task which wasn’t described in the job listing, we were to ignore it. This is advice which some union reps will also give, he didn’t just pull it out of his left elbow. You know, “da man pays for what he pays, don’t give da man any more than he pays for”.
I ignored his advice. My contract was renewed, and eventually I was offered that project mentioned above aaaand…
She took his advice. She was replaced. Her replacement, who ignored the advice, was eventually promoted to lab manager.
My father gave me a few dollops of advice during my younger years which were such bad advice that, even at my tender young age at the time, I could see were awful. I didn’t follow a lot of that advice, and never regretted it.
I agree with this . The problem with the advice is that it is so vague. Like you pointed out, a lot of people will fill in the blanks with a lot of stupid ideas.
Sometimes I wonder if some of these millennials swimming in debt took that advice too literally.
“Talk about what’s bothering you. You’ll feel better!”
My mother was (and is) a therapist. In addition I feel like this was the message in the air when I was growing up all around on talk shows and magazines and after school specials.
It took me a long long time to realize that the way out of depression (for me) was not to talk about the bad feelings I was having. That was the way into a deep self-reinforcing hole. For me, doing things that cheered me up, distracted me and got me doing things was the way out of depression.
Luckily I had figured this out by the time I had a baby daughter that died. It was very sad and made me feel bad. But I knew that support groups and therapists would only make me feel worse. I didn’t repress the grief, but I also didn’t talk about it except in the abstract (“yes, I am feeling a lot of grief, but it does me no good to talk about it. Did you see Titanic?”). 18 years on I still feel like that was the right way for me to handle my sadness.
“Don’t keep your anger bottled up. You have to let it out!” When I was a teenager, I had quite a temper. As an adult, I keep it stifled. I found that letting my anger run free just made me angrier, whereas shutting it down keeps me thinking rationally. And 99% of the time, when you think about something you realize it shouldn’t really cause you to lose your temper.
I guess it’s different if you have a reason to be angry and you never deal with that reason, but for the average person I think it’s better to just calm the hell down rather than thinking that expressing your anger loudly is somehow therapeutic.
I… am the exception that proves the rule for the advice “If he isn’t eager to go ahead and marry you, he just isn’t that into you.” Basically everyone was telling me, around year 4 or so of our relationship and no marriage in sight (and I did want to get married, I realize it’s different for couples where they agree that the formalism of marriage isn’t a priority), that he wasn’t that into me.
He was into me. We eventually got married and it was and is totally awesome; he’s an amazing guy and every day I feel lucky that he’s my spouse. He just takes a really long time to commit to anything (we’re even still working on buying a new car… five years and counting…) and still jokes that we “rushed” into marriage.
I don’t roll my eyes when people give that advice to others, though, because even though it wasn’t the case for me, it’s more often the case than not.
I’m so old at this point that I can’t remember if I was told to “do what you love” when I was a teenager, but I tried to do it. I loved playing rock and roll. You know what I didn’t love? Playing it 6 or 7 nights a week in dive bars and depending on that to survive. And I quit college and alienated my parents to pursue that. :smack:
Thirteen years of crappy jobs and part-time music later, I went back to college hoping to find, as I told everyone back then, “a job I can stand”. That worked out. I have been a programmer for 27 years now. It beats digging ditches, and it beats playing in dive bars.
One advice I heard a few times when growing up was along the lines of, “If you have to face adversity and prosperity, then get the hard part over first so you can enjoy the good part later.” Similar advice is also loosely interpreted in modern culture by some as, “Waiting is better”, “The future can be better than the present,” etc., …you get my point.
But really, waiting is **not **necessarily better. Sometimes you have to strike when the iron is hot. Tomorrow will *not *necessarily be better than today. Success when in your 30s can be far more impactful than the same success in your 60s. Waiting or delaying is **not **necessarily better. It’s all about timing and circumstances.
The world can’t consist solely of movie directors, rock stars, jet pilots, and 200,000 Presidents of the United States.
It’s always some rich, successful person on stage telling people “Do what you love.” Sometimes it’s an even more overt, “Look, I’m a success story, 1 out of 100. Don’t you wish you were me?”
Oh, there definitely are. It seems to me that for every recent college grad that made the right decision by chasing a “passion,”, there are five others who regret it. And five others who probably SHOULD regret it, but they are too optimistic or proud to admit it.
My niece is trying to figure out what she’s going to study in college. It seems like everyone is telling her to “do what she loves”. The girl is just 16. She hasn’t done enough of anything to know what she loves. But she knows where her abilities lie and what she can tolerate. What is so wrong about using these as her selection criteria?
“Do what you love” makes perfect sense when you have unlimited financial options and someone who’s willing to support you if your passion fizzles. But this doesn’t describe the majority of college kids. Maybe if college was free, I’d feel differently about the whole thing.
My aunt, the typical homemaker: “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” (Not an exact quote, but words to that effect, and much more drawn out.)
Nah. There are guys around who don’t care for elaborate food on a daily basis, or who enjoy cooking themselves. These are the guys for me.
‘Buying a used car is a bad idea’. In my experience I have saved a lot of money doing this. They may require repairs but those are cheap compared to the cost and depreciation of a new vehicle.
Well, it depends…different in what way?
If one has a strong passion for architecture and 3-D design, that’s great, one may be the next Frank Lloyd Wright.