What’s the best advice someone ever gave you? I’ve been contemplating this question after thumbing through the grandparents operating manual and coming across the section that says: “Be prepared to occasionally dispense advice, and try to do so without sounding tiresome or pedantic.”
I’m not sure what that last word means, but I have received plenty of advice over the years and some of it is just starting to make sense to me.
“The rewards are higher,” is the advice my father repeatedly imparted with a sly arch of one eyebrow. As a kid, I interpreted those words as “try harder.” But 50 years after first hearing them, and 19 years after my father’s death, I think he was suggesting that risk is defined as a venture into the unknown in search of a reward that, at the journey’s outset, may not even be tangible.
I have an uncle who made a lot of money and loved to dispense advice about “seed money.” As a kid, I assumed he was trying to tell me that the best way to launch a business venture was to get somebody to give you money.
Middle-aged me realizes I got it wrong. What he was trying to tell me is never forget the people who give you a leg up in life.
My mother’s father loved taking his grandchildren out to his east Colorado farm. Following him around one day, I watched him stop in mid-stride and slowly turn in a full circle. “North, south, east, west, it doesn’t get better than this,” he said.
And then he walked away, leaving me perplexed until the moment years later when I realized he was telling me the secret to happiness is appreciating what’s under your feet and living in the moment, right now.
Being a Napoleonophile, I like the advice attributed to L’Empereur to the effect: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” The cynical corollary to this advice is, “Become the person who knows exactly the right moment to celebrate a success achieved by people who worked hard while you stood back and watched.”
My mother gave me the best kind of advice: Lessons from her life for me to incorporate into my own. She spent big chunks of her adult life living alone and imparted to me the reminder that I had better get comfortable with myself because there will be times when no one else is around.
I can answer the question I asked at the beginning of this column by saying the best advice I ever got is: Keep your mouth shut. It works effectively in bars, dating situations, and work and any number of other scenarios.
All the times I rushed into a conversation or conflict spouting my mouth off, I ended up being part of the problem instead of facilitating a solution. More than a few women made it clear to me that the gift of gab may work on the big screen for Matthew McConaughey and Bradley Cooper, but us mere mortals of the male persuasion are better off focusing on listening to women instead of talking at them. Last but not least, I draw on the advice a tough guy once offered me: “Don’t let your mouth write checks the rest of you can’t cash.”
Another tough guy who tackled adversity and turmoil during his life also appreciated the value of silence, even though he was a guy who seemed to be able to consistently say really smart-sounding stuff.
Abraham Lincoln reminded us, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
If there is one piece of advice I will eventually offer my granddaughter from the pile I just dumped on the proverbial floor, it would be the turning-in-a-circle one my grandfather offered: Make the most of where you are at any given moment and realize the whole world is waiting for you to explore it.
But I’m also pretty partial to, “The rewards are higher.”
