“A WOMAN’S best friend is a man’s imagination. Leave something on -anything-even if it’s just a little chiffon.” This was Ann Corio’s advice to her rookie strippers. In spite of our embrace of a bare-it-all spirit, Corio’s advice still seems worthwhile. It meets one of the tests that advice -to qualify as the best -must pass: It must reflect hard-gained understanding. Don’t accept advice from people whose lives have been led far from the arena because they are, as Teddy Roosevelt said, “cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”
Today, the giving of advice is a robust growth industry. Consultants abound, charging unconscionable fees to advise us that people would rather be happy than sad and would rather have money than not. Bookstores address our appetite for advice with book after enervating book. Despite this onslaught, good advice -and the people who give it -still seems scarce. That’s too bad, because the right advice given at the right time can give a life a leg up.
Advice to children -especially our own – will remain out of this discussion. I, for example, subject my three boys to an inexhaustible stream of advice, most of which is endured with respectful indifference. While this is frustrating, I remain undis-couraged and have even grown to admire their determination to learn things the hard way. Anyway, they will come around – I hope – not to a full embrace of my advice but to the realization that they need the clues that the right advice can provide.
Among the problems with advice is the obligation most people feel to give it when they shouldn’t. And then there’s the problem of getting advice from people who don’t have a personal stake in the subject. Remember the 60 Minutes story examining where Congress’ major proponents of busing sent their own children to school? Well, to private schools, they uncomfortably admitted. But, oh, the moral advice they gave to the great unwashed on why they should consent to having their children’s lives and educations disrupted. I have the same kind of feeling about stockbrokers who advise people to invest in certain stocks. Somehow they never think it’s pertinent when the client asks the broker whether he’s putting his own money into the stock. And, generally, any advice from a college professor should be examined closely. In their privileged, tenured world, professors tend to think of themselves as possessing a purity beyond our reach, which taints their advice with an elegant irrelevance.
An exception would be the advice delivered by the Harvard Business School professor who told his students, “There comes a time when it’s necessary to forget principle and do what’s right.” Next to that, the best business advice I’ve heard was given by Mort Meyerson, president of Electronic Data Systems, a company that has enjoyed more than a modest degree of success. Meyerson said that when he speaks to young people who have recently joined the company, he knows they’re looking for divine revelation -advice that should be preceded by drum rolls and come from the direction of heaven delivered by someone resembling Charlton Heston. But Meyer-son tells them the straight truth: “Go where the problems are; go where the trouble is.” The people who make it, he believes, are the ones who have been thrown into tough situations early and have had to deal with them. Too often, those are just the situations we’re inclined to avoid. But it’s the no-win situations that offer the greatest rewards.
Advice, to be effective, should not filibuster. In fact, the more succinct it is, the more unequivocal it can be. I remember those faraway days of yesteryear when I was trying to make contact, any kind of contact -phone, mail, lunch-line and, hope of hopes, physical -with members of the opposite sex. I remember all too clearly being told once -well, more than once-by a series of unattainable dream girls to “get lost.” It was not profound advice, but to this day it remains as direct as any I’ve received.
In the end, the ability to take advice is exceeded in importance only by the ability to know when to ignore it, especially from those who would advise us to narrow our vision and scale down our dreams. That’s the easiest kind of advice to give, but it may be the most destructive. It often comes from those who love us most, for they sometimes understand the risk and pain involved in the pursuit of dreams. Herman Melville must have understood; found taped to the inside of his desk when he died was a piece of paper on which he had written this advice to himself: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.”
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