How to Avoid the Advice Giving Trap

No one wants advice — only corroboration — (maybe/maybe not)

Piyush Kamal🎖
6 min readJun 24, 2021
Photo by Andrea Tummons on Unsplash

Today everyone has an opinion and advice — sometimes as strong as tartar sitting on our molars.

Frankly speaking, isn’t that always been the case.

Maybe the only difference is that right now everyone’s opinion and advice are right up in your face. Sometimes, obnoxiously so. In fact, you don’t need to venture beyond the territorial periphery of your social media accounts to validate this hypothesis.

But actually, how did we manage to become so cocksure to belch advice at the drop of a hat? Contrast this with the amount of time wasted by an average American on choosing what to watch next on streaming content — forty-five hours per year.

Perhaps a lot of credit goes to the legacy of an archaic education system that seems keen to judge us not on our capability to ask questions but on our ability to answer what has been taught inside classrooms.

However, from the evolutionary perspective, giving advice helps you serve the following ego-based needs at a deeper level —

  1. It makes you look like the smartest one in the room. It makes you look as if you’re adding value to the conversation. It helps people to perceive you in a better light if…

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Piyush Kamal🎖
Piyush Kamal🎖

Written by Piyush Kamal🎖

Published Author Who Loves to Play at the Intersection of Cognitive Psychology, Neuroscience, & Philosophy — Sharing the Slice of Wisdom Not on Paper but Screen