For a while now some of my friends were advising me to go one way about this one issue, and I being my stubborn self have been doing quite the opposite. Is that right, or is it not? According to them, nope, and I can no longer tell. I think it is right, I want to believe it is right, and although there were huge signs telling me I am wrong, there was always something else there, convincing me otherwise.

Think about it, when you ask you friends for an advice, they simply give you the answer based on some of the following:
1) What they think you need to hear
2) What they think you want to hear
3) What they think is best for your to hear
4) Their prior experience
5) Their “analysis” and their “understanding” of the problem

The fact is though, there is never an identical problem which would have a sure-thing solution. All we can do is make some assumptions, look at the facts, check with the gut instinct and then go from there. Friends can do it all, but they cannot follow an instinct because they will never have more information than we do.

I was chatting with an old fiend who was asking me for an advice on her relationship. It was kind of funny that she was asking me for an advice, but she was, yay! Luckily, I didn’t know much about the problem so all I could do was to abstract it, look at all the information she gave me and then tell her what I thought she should do based on what she wanted to happen, and what would likely happen if she did otherwise. I am happy to say I think it worked out well.

I liked what she told me afterwards. Apparently all her friends were telling my friend something else, they hated the guy, thought he was an ass and clearly weren’t looking at what she needed. Her friends were pushing to leave because that would protect her from possibly getting hurt. The thing is, I knew that she really wanted stay but didn’t know what she needed to do to stay and make things work. For a while I only heard from her how great the guy was and how exciting it was for them to be together, but then afterwards when things weren’t working out so smoothly, she was putting the blame on him. It was easy  to walk and jump on some other boy who was already in stand-by, but I think she finally figured out what really matters to her in the end. She now admits that her friends really didn’t know the guy the way she did. They knew what they heard, what they saw, but only my friend could see the whole story, feel what she needed to read between the lines.

I am happy for those guys, but this might be an exception to the rule, who knows. Some people prefer to follow advice and to stick to a plan, some don’t. Maybe I should listen to my friends and do what they think is right, or maybe I will stick with the course and see where it takes me. Maybe I had been watching too many happy-ending cartoons when I was a kid, time till tell.

Lastly, I forgot to include an entertainment piece. Here it is!