303: Giving Back Insights #115 — Advice versus Insight with Rob Lowe

Everyone’s experience is unique and everyone’s style has to be their own.

Welcome to the 115th episode of Giving Back Insights! Insights are our solo show to celebrate how our guests and their charities serve others, explore actions each of can take to make a difference in people’s lives and connect.

Today we’re talking about Advice versus Insight! Enjoy today’s episode and keep your comments and feedback coming.

Life is a balancing act. You need to figure out what is important to you and work everything else around it.

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Key Takeaways:

There is a very thin line between advice and insights. They both are well intentioned and the difference may be that insight is simply sharing where advice is pretty specific because there is an expectation or atleast hope that the personal advice is given to will follow that.

I am reading a lot nowadays from Medium.
So today I want to share “The Mind-Blowingly Simple And Positive Advice That Changed My Entire Life” By Nicolas Cole that I recently read on his medium blog.

It’s a kind of advice from himself to himself.

The Mind-Blowingly Simple And Positive Advice That Changed My Entire Life
By Nicolas Cole on Medium.com

I was sitting in the middle of the forest with nothing but a tent, a small bag of fruits and nuts, a shovel, and a roll of toilet paper.

Each of us was given a space in this forest to spend 3 days by ourselves.

It was the afternoon, and for miles I saw trees and trees. There were no sounds other than the crackling of leaves under my shoes when I would pace my space back and forth. Every once in a while, I would test the silence and let out a scream, wanting to see how long it would echo.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
It carried into the distance for a moment and then faded.

Just like many of my thoughts of home.

I had arrived on this trip with a lot of anger.
I was 19, feeling all the things you feel when you’re 19.

I felt like my parents didn’t understand me. I felt like everything I did was wrong. I felt like no matter how hard I tried, I would never be the person they wanted me to be. I felt lost and didn’t know what I wanted to be in life. I enjoyed music. I enjoyed writing. But other than that, I didn’t enjoy much else. Most days, I just felt stuck.

But that day in the forest wasn’t like most days.

Finally, I had a moment to hear those thoughts — the ones that played the victim’s song. With 3 entire days to myself, that song became clearer and clearer, to the point where the words no longer seemed like my own.

They were just lyrics I’d memorized and repeated to myself, endlessly.
On the 3rd day (“He rose again…jk”) one of the counselors came by my tent. We sat on a small patch of grass.

“How was it?” she asked.

“Unbelievable,” I said, playing with a stick in my hand. I’d never felt so calm.

“Really? Learn anything special about yourself?” she said.

The way she said it, I could tell she was expecting a cliche response.

I started to nod. I hadn’t put my conclusion quite into words yet.
“Nothing in my life is going to change unless I make it so.”
She flickered her eyes, staring, not saying anything.

“And how did you learn that?” she asked.

I looked out at the vastness and the trees. The entire forest hadn’t changed at all in 3 days, and yet I felt like an entirely different person.

“Because all the things I want to change in my life, I keep waiting for other people to change them. But I don’t have control over other people. The only thing I have control over is myself. So, if I want anything to change, I have to be the one to do it.”

She tilted her head a bit and looked at me skeptically.
“Are you saying this just because you think it’s what I want to hear?” she asked. I was on a 30-day canoe trip for troubled teens, after all.

I shook my head, slowly and without defense.

“Nope,” I said softly. “I understand that anything I want in this world, I have to be the one to make it happen.”

I’ve been living on my own advice ever since.

Thanks for reading 🙂

I shared with this with my son who is under lot of pressure. So I thought I would share because this guy is really young too and same age as him.

So I wanted to make him understand that, whatever he wants is up to him, not that he is alone just to understand that he has very little control over everything and 100% control over himself.