Sometimes the advice you need most comes from someone you’ve already decided not to listen to.
I used to say I wouldn’t listen to anyone younger than me.
At the time, it made sense.
What could somebody younger than me tell me about life when I had already lived through things they hadn’t experienced yet?
Then I got older.
And I realized how stupid that rule was.
Because you can learn from anybody.
A child can accidentally expose something about yourself that you’ve been ignoring for years.
Someone younger than you can understand technology, money, fitness, relationships, or business better than you.
Someone who has made a complete mess of his own life can still warn you about the exact mistake you’re about to make.
The problem isn’t always the quality of the message.
Sometimes we reject good information because we don’t respect the person delivering it.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger
My wife and I were on one of our normal coffee dates recently when I asked her a question:
Does the message matter more, or does the person delivering it matter more?
She said the message.
That conversation stayed with me.
Because there’s a reason people say:
Don’t shoot the messenger.
Sometimes somebody tells you exactly what you need to hear, and your first reaction is anger.
Not necessarily because they’re wrong.
Because you don’t like hearing it from them.
Parents experience this constantly.
You tell your children something because you can see where the road leads.
They hear restriction.
You see consequence.
They hear criticism.
You see a pattern.
And years later, sometimes they finally understand what you were trying to tell them.
I know because I was that kid too.
The Message Changed Clothes
My father used to tell me to take my time when buying things, especially cars.
Sit with the decision.
Don’t rush.
Think about it.
There was only one problem.
He didn’t always follow his own advice.
And that creates an easy excuse when you’re young.
Why should I listen to you when you don’t even do it yourself?
Years later, after making impulsive purchases of my own and eventually regretting some of them, I understood something I couldn’t see back then.
His inability to consistently follow the lesson didn’t automatically make the lesson false.
In fact, his mistakes may have been exactly where the lesson came from.
That changed something for me.
Because sometimes the messenger isn’t speaking from mastery.
He’s speaking from scars.
He isn’t telling you what works because he executed perfectly.
He’s telling you what doesn’t work because he already paid the bill.
And if you’re arrogant enough to require perfection from everyone who teaches you something, you’ll end up paying for lessons that someone else already bought.
Wisdom Doesn’t Require a Perfect Teacher
I believe heavily in patterns and cycles.
Call it pattern recognition.
Call it déjà vu.
Call it history repeating itself.
Call it whatever you want.
Live long enough and pay attention, and you’ll notice that human beings keep encountering different versions of the same problems.
Different decade.
Different technology.
Different people.
Same patterns.
That’s why age alone doesn’t determine wisdom.
Experience matters.
Observation matters too.
You don’t have to get burned to understand that fire is hot.
Sometimes you watched somebody else touch it.
Sometimes you read about what happened to somebody who touched it.
Sometimes somebody warned you because they touched it.
Wisdom is being disciplined enough to learn from all three.
We Judge the Face Before the Information
This problem extends far beyond parents and children.
We do it with politics.
We do it with religion.
We do it with money.
We do it online.
Once a message becomes attached to a person, organization, political party, celebrity, or ideology, many people stop evaluating the idea independently.
The identity becomes a filter.
If you like the person, you’re tempted to defend the message.
If you dislike the person, you’re tempted to reject it.
Neither response requires much thinking.
Remove the personality and you’re forced to deal with the argument itself.
Is it true?
Does it make sense?
Does the evidence support it?
Can I use it?
Those questions are harder than deciding whether you like somebody.
That’s Why I Love Writing
Writing strips away some of the performance.
If you found a page containing something I wrote without my name attached to it, you wouldn’t immediately know my age.
You wouldn’t necessarily know what I looked like.
You wouldn’t know whether we grew up the same way.
You’d have fewer shortcuts for deciding whether you liked me.
You’d have to wrestle with the words.
That’s one reason I’ve grown to love writing so much.
I’m not trying to become the message.
I’m trying to leave one behind.
Take what helps you.
Question what doesn’t.
Challenge it.
Test it against your own experience.
But don’t reject something useful simply because you don’t like the package it arrived in.
You Might Hear It Again
One of the strange things about life is that lessons seem to keep returning.
Your father tells you.
You ignore him.
Your boss tells you.
You dismiss it.
Your wife tells you.
You get defensive.
A book says the same thing five years later and suddenly you’re highlighting the damn page.
The message changed clothes.
That’s all.
Eventually life has a way of teaching you what you refused to learn voluntarily.
Sometimes through wisdom.
Sometimes through observation.
Sometimes through pain.
So the next time someone tells you something that immediately irritates you, resist the urge to evaluate the person first.
Ask a better question:
If somebody I respected said these exact same words, would I listen?
If the answer is yes, your problem might not be the message.
It might be the messenger.
And that’s a dangerous reason to ignore the truth.
Blueprint your sovereignty.
—Drew
