Advice
 

We give and take a lot of advice on this forum, and it got me thinking. We all have extremely different backgrounds, and diverse experiences. I'm sure we could all learn something from everyone else here as a result. So, I was wondering if anyone here would be willing to write down some of the best advice they have ever received, and maybe give us some background and setting as well. I'm hoping to gain some wisdom from the collective...;).

Just to kick it off, some of the best advice I ever got was from my dad, right before I headed off to college. He told me, "Life isn't like a movie, major problems can never be fixed in an hour and a half." Like most good advice, I had no idea what he meant at the time. But now that I'm trying to hold down a job, go to school and am married...it makes a lot of sense.

Any other takers?

One thing you should keep in mind about advice if you ever add parent to the mix is that there is a mind-boggling array of opinions on how kids should be raised/fed/disciplined etc., etc., etc. Most advice you get will be flat out contradictory to the last advice you got which can be really frustrating, especially with your first kid when you are pretty much learning a scary job on the fly with very little sleep.

In most situations when you need advice you need to seek it out, but with parenting complete strangers ( read ####wads ) will offer their candid opinions on what you are doing wrong.

So my advice on asking advice is take what makes sense to you and dismiss the rest as difference of opinion.

Being a gamer, one golden piece of advice I have come across.

Never take the path of least resistance, for it will always become the path of most resistance. Adding to this, never, ever take the easiest path.

I have most recently come across this one in Guitar Hero. I, thinking I'm the newb, start off on the easiest difficulty. Little did I know that if I had never decided to accept the fact that failure is okay sometimes, I would have never had the confidence to reach up into the medium difficulty.

There's another gold piece of advice: Don't be afraid of your failures. NEVER be afraid of your failures. If you fear them, they'll hold you back.

best advice was given to me by my mum.

'you can never un-say something'

and its saved my arse on a number of occasions... its very hard to take something back once you have said it... especially if it was said in the heat of the moment.

From my father:
"Never eat anything that's blue: never drink anything that's green."
"Any fool can learn from their own mistakes. The smart thing is to learn from other people's."
"Measure twice. Cut once."

From my trumpet teacher:
"If you're going to do something really badly, make sure it's something that no-one else knows."

From Jimmy Smith:
"ALL the chords are good."

From Alexandre Dumas (admittedly, he didn't say this to me):
"The only people that you can be sure of never meeting again are the dead."

All people want exactly three things from their job. Provide them and you will have happy workers.

1. To feel the work they do is important.

2. To feel appreciated for the work they do.

3. To feel they are being treated fairly.

You cannot say "thank you" or "good job" often enough.

From one of my former bosses:

"Our most important job responsibility is to train our replacement."

"The first thing you have to do is learn how to learn."

That's actually the very first thing that I remember my Grandfather saying to me. Then he went on to talk about good listening skills, I don't remember much of that part of the conversation, wasn't paying attention :D.

But the first statement was very important to me. It especially applies to me because I have some learning disabilities, and, sadly, schooling systems are not built for my kind of mind. So I have to go and "learn how to learn" quite a bit. I wonder were I would be without that advice...

my dad said, "Never keep all your eggs in one basket"

After a back up server died on me, I knew exactly what that meant, and now try to practice redundant back ups as much as possible.

That is good advice. I'd probably add to that don't be afraid to own up to your failures. It is so much better to just come out and say "I screwed up, how can I fix this?" than to try and hide your mistakes.

My current sig line:

"You can shear a sheep many times but skin him only once." –T.A. Preston, Sr.


I think it was his son who said, "Gambling is a hard way to make an easy living."

Son, no matter how far you travel, or how smart you get, always remember this: Someday, somewhere, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice brand new deck of cards on which the seal is never broken, and the guy is going to offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going to get an ear full of cider.

I follow this one very well.

I have a backup of my most important text files on my blog's storage space.

My music is on my two iPods.

Everything else goes on the iPods as well. I use one, my mom uses the other. So my data is in more place than one.

"Keep all your eggs in one basket, then watch that basket very closely" --Andrew Carnegie. I don't know how that goes for advice, but Carnegie was a very rich man, that's for sure.

I'm the one doling out advice, my parents never shared wisdom with me. However, I am now a parent and this is one of mine...

"If you are on the wrong road, it does not matter how fast your car is or how far you have traveled."

As a performer, public speaker, designer, and writer, I am always reading and rereading Mickey's 10 Commandments (quotes by Walt Disney and compiled by Martin Sklar). Here is number one, which is number one in my book...

"Know your audience - Don't bore people, talk down to them or lose them by assuming that they know what you know."

Don't smoke.

http://home.iprimus.com.au/fazstp/yul_brynner.jpg

The corollary to this: You only get one chance to make a first impression.

And, RE Failure -- my brother, who was the executive VP of a large company used to say that if the people who worked for him didn't screw up at least 15% of the time, they weren't trying new approaches, weren't innovative enough. On the other hand, if they screwed up much more than 15% of the time, they were taking unnecessary risks.

:eek::eek:

Did he not understand the concept of expected values, normal distribution or a standard deviation? :D

I have to agree that those who don't make mistakes are not in the game. But if someone is taking risks that will payoff tenfold when successful or lose the entire investment upon failure, a 75 percent failure rate is still highly profitable.

But did you factor in the number of screw ups that would be created down the corporate line by that one screw up? The fact that the mistake will be compounded might make a difference.

Assuming a 100 percent loss on a failed investment (corporate risk) does indeed account for such screw ups. But, that's not the point. The point is that acceptable rates of mistakes should depend on the types of risks being taken, and that an acceptable range is necessary. And even that point was intended to be taken lightly.

Slight rephrasing used in sport parachuting and general aviation:

Learn from the mistakes of others - you won't live long enough to make them all yourself.

http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/ar...-20080316.html

Won't be up for much longer.

Bear in mind that my brother's philosophy was based on limitations on what the individuals could do. By 15% I meant 15% of their range, not of the company's.

Kind of a variation on this:

"Whatever you run from will chase you."

If you are in trouble or something is bothering you, turn and face it right away rather than ignoring it. It applies to figuring out limits in Calculus before the next test, to stopping after you've mashed a parked car on the street with no one around.

gotta go back to the classics, for the best piece of advice, ever:

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." - Socrates ;)

Some relationship advice for guys: There are times in a relationship where it seems to most rational people that an honest opinion is required. This is a trap. While these times are hard to recognise until you are facing an icy stare it may help to rehearse these 'honest opinions' ahead of time;

You look great. That really suits you.
I like your hair.
I'm so sorry. It's completely my fault.
Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

Another interesting bit of relationship advice, "actions speak louder than words." If you think your significant other should be kind, trying being kind to them rather telling them to be nice. It will be a good example and it will make them happy. So you've made your point, and you don't get yelled at for doing it :).

""Our most important job responsibility is to train our replacement." "
When I worked for IBM the theory was that when you got your new position your first job was to identify and groom your replacement. If you are not replaceable you are not promotable.

My father said:
"Never run up stairs, never back odds-on and never argue with a policemen."
My Uncle Seamus said:
"Thumb on the blade and cut upwards."

Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Or, perhaps, said person’s re-election? :cool:
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Precisely the point. In the US, reelection and corporate money are joined at the hip.

More Advice: Hijacking my thread to talk about politics or economics will get you smacked...through the internet.

My grandfather always used to say to me "don't **** where you eat."

For years I thought that was the most useless advice you could give someone till I realized it was a metaphor. took several more years after that to really appreciate what it meant.

Advice I give to people unsolicited (or when teaching them poker) "The right decision is always the right decision, no matter the outcome."

For those of us who worked mainly among women on customer sites came the advice:
You don't get your meat where you get your bread and butter.
Bit dated nowadays.

"Never wipe your arse with a broken bottle."

Said by a friend of mine in response to a taxi driver who asked for a tip.

lol - that's gone beyond 'dated' to become completely incomprehensible. what exactly is that supposed to mean?

but if you want advice, try this:

stepping up always serves you better then stepping back. assuming you survive... ;)

Who are you? Chuck Norris? (AKA Mikey-San)

You don't dip you pen in company ink.

You don't fish off the company pier.

If I was, would I need a forum to talk to all of you?

Don't date your customer's staff. It was a very big no-no.
One of my peers dated a card punch operator at a large customer. He did well that night.
Next day, as he entered the punch-room, 50 pairs of eyes bored into him. She'd told them everything that had happened. He was never able to go back to that site.
That said, marriages between our field guys and customer staff was not unknown.

Lets see, card punch rooms were when? So this anecdote would make you.... ancient?

when I was in high school, I had a teacher who insisted that these new-fangled things called cal-cu-la-tors would never replace slide rules for anyone doing serious math. and we had a computer on campus - it was a DEC machine with 128k of memory that needed its boot codes keyed in through a set of toggle switches on the front (it had an internal drive, yes, but I guess they hadn't figured out the software boot process yet).

my fingers can still run through the binary boot codes, if I think about it. good times, good times...

"Run in the sun, walk in the shade" was my jogging motto.

ie, when things are tough get stuck in, when things ease up, so can you.

I learned to program on a DEC PDP-8 (what you just described) serial #12. Compiling a Fortran II program was a three pass affair, running a punched tape through an ASR-33 (teletype machine). My first program wrote:

HI THERE
WELCOME

by drawing the letters on a small x-y oscilloscope (via three 8-bit DACs) using the z control to turn off the beam between letters. That was in 1963, I think
Shows my age.... Good times indeed, tw.

Oh, and you had to toggle in the boot program because the PDP-8 didn't have any ROM and its RAM was actually a core memory mesh of ferrite beads roughly 8" square for each 1024 bits of memory.

those things must have been around for a while then (or else my school got gypped into buying an ancient one) because I was still messing my diapers in 1963.

... a mesh of ferrite beads. you mean something like this?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/jeffzycin...ges/abacus.jpg:D

Core memory doesn't lose it's data when the power's off - it wasn't possible to leave the boot program in memory?

I don't recall why, but it wasn't. The code you toggled in contained the instructions for finding and accessing the tape reader on the Teletype i/o, so unless you keyed that in before shutting down, I suppose, that wasn't what was in memory.

Actually, the first machine I ever used was a Royal McBee LGP-30 which had an 80-track drum memory. Incredibly tedious to program. That was in 1961.

That said, I didn't mean to hijack this thread. Back to Advice!!

Marry an orphan. That way you never have to put up with boring in-laws during the holiday season.

'Tis the season for alcohol fueled domestic conflict :rolleyes:.

OK. Not to hijack the thread, but I feel I have the right of reply.
I'm 67. I started to learn about punches and verifiers in 1966.
Incidentally, the systems I worked on would all start up from a deck of cards. Anyone remember IBM's Job Control Language? It was said that the quickest way to write a correct JCL deck was to submit a blank deck and debug the error messages.

This topic has mated nicely with something that has been lurking in my mind of late.
It's probably fodder for another thread but I am becoming acutely aware of all the stuff I've had to learn for my jobs. Almost all of that stuff is absolutely useless today. Stuff we built careers on and nobody cares any more.
Don't get me started. (Assuming I could remember enough to be useful... :))

Over the years these have been at the forefront of my life,

"Question Authority"
"Problems are opportunities for solutions"
"Hold your enemies close"

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best...

And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...

My two centimes:

Your next misfortune will not be something that you have been worrying about, but something you haven't even thought about, blindsiding you. Ergo, if you worry sufficiently about something, it can't happen to you.

Worrying just means you are living your life as if the dreaded event has already occurred. It can cripple you when in reality it may never happen.

I know, fazstp: I have had much suffering in my life, most of which never actually happened. I was merely extracting the michael from myself and those like me.

Sorry to detract from the micky taking :).

a bit of spiritual wisdom (from people like J Krishnamurti, Eckhard Tolle, and etc): Spiritual problems occur when you take the memory of the past, project it onto similar future situations, and solidify that outcome as an actuality in the present. You resolve it (and this is much easier to say than do) by remembering/realizing that the past and the future only exist in the present as mental constructs, and the present is intrinsically fluid.

I usually think of it as a grammatical problem - you mix up the past tense, present perfect tense, and future perfect tense. "X happened in situations Y" becomes "X has (always) happened in situations Y" and morphs into "X will have (inevitably) happened in (future) situations Y", which prejudices any situation Y you find yourself in.

Of course, in many instances, this is simply learning from experience.

Though I think the learning process is easily corrupted by anxiety. The impact of an event is exaggerated and takes on a life of it's own. It consumes so much mental energy as to become debilitating when taken to extremes like phobias. I think it's also closely linked to the human tendency to addiction.

I agree. In many instances, anxiety leads to superstitious behaviors that have nothing to do with probable causalities.

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That’s a fascinating thought! Would you care to expand? :)
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I guess the sort of mechanism I'm thinking of applies more to non-drug addictions, although anxiety can play a part there too in terms of self medication but that's another issue.

What I'm talking about though are addictions like gambling, shopping, the internet, porn. The object of desire takes on an exaggerated importance and consumes more and more mental resources until you give in. It rarely meets your expectations and then you regret your weakness and hit a bit of a downer until you begin the cycle again. The driving force is the desire and the underlying anxiety that causes. The fact that the object of your addiction failed to satisfy your initial desires is conveniently ignored. You're chasing some sort of mythological ideal that you can never find so your desire can never be quenched.

I guess the most extreme form of this mechanism is in OCD. The sufferer is compelled to perform some often nonsensical ritual to relieve the anxiety caused by their obsession.

Anyway, I hope I'm making sense here.

The big question is whether all our main desires fall into that category.

I think it's a matter of degree, and of reactivity. The buddha said that 'desire is the root of disillusionment'. when you want something, what you want is the mental construct you've imagined, not the thing itself. the greater the difference between your mental constructions and the things that actually exist in the world, the greater your disappointment with what you get, and the greater your craving for what you think you've missed - thus, the more you have to chase after that imaginary mental construction. We all suffer from it to one extent or another.

The cynicism of age helps to moderate expectations (and desire) substantially. One becomes much more a realist.

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That reminds me of two rather dark jokes:

Q: What’s the difference between a Polish optimist and a Polish pessimist?
A: A Polish pessimist is an experienced optimist.

Q: What’s a Russian brisling?
A: A blue whale that has survived Communism.

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"Smile", they said, "Things could be worse".

So I did, and they were.