The Very Best Advice

On more than one occasion each and every one of us has been presented with the very best well-worn out path but cut out our own path to success. But is it legitimately true that even listening perfectly to the very best advice would not be as successful as one’s own thinking and decision? I personally owe all my success to not conforming to the strict path of everyone else but doing what I believe in sincerely. More specifically, when we are all told explicitly what is best for us, true success can only be found if we do what we think is the best for us, for only then will we ever learn.

Theoretically, in no situation will doing what we think is best ever lead us away from learning. As humans it is our nature to learn best from trial and error. So when we are given advice on something and anything, if we conform to it, we don’t learn anything. But if we do what we think is best, then we can learn from our failure or find that what we thought truly was the best. Conforming to advice will only lead us away from success because we will never learn anything.

Let me now prove that success cannot be derived from success with specific examples and situations. At a conference earlier this year, I was placed into a team of kids and presented with a global challenge. The team and I collaborated together and collected many diverse ideas and when we were done I compiled them all together and reorganized the separate ideas into one main concept. But the whole time the clock was ticking down to our presentation, and I had yet to prepare my own speech. Our team counselor gave me very good advice on working on what I had to say and I paid very meticulously close attention to his advice, but went off and did the precise opposite. I kept working and helping everyone else’s presentation to make sure they captured the right idea and all the pieces would fit together cohesively instead of doing my own presentation. About an hour before our team’s presentation only did I compile what I would say myself and found that it was in no way enough time to become fluent in my long speech. My team won the challenge because the presentation was so cohesively pieced together and I learned to allocate myself more time in general, so in the end of the day it was not listening to the very best advice that allowed me to be successful.