What’s the Best Advice You’ve Ever Received?

Great advice can stay with you for years—but the words themselves are only part of what makes advice valuable.

Sometimes a mentor says exactly what you needed to hear. A friend asks a question that changes your perspective. A manager gives you feedback that makes your work better. Or someone shares a simple sentence that suddenly helps you see a difficult situation differently.

But there is an important difference between hearing good advice and actually using it.

The best advice is not necessarily the most inspirational sentence you have ever heard. It is often the advice that helps you make a better decision, change a behavior, avoid a repeated mistake, or take the next useful step.

What Makes Advice Worth Remembering?

Good advice usually does at least one of a few things:

• Helps you see something you were missing.
• Challenges an assumption.
• Makes a complicated problem simpler.
• Encourages action when you are stuck.
• Prevents you from repeating a mistake.
• Gives you a useful question to ask yourself.

And sometimes advice becomes valuable only later, when experience gives you enough context to understand what the person meant.

That is one reason it is worth paying attention not only to what someone tells you, but also to why the advice matters in your particular situation.

5 Pieces of Advice Worth Thinking About

1. Focus on What You Can Influence

It is easy to spend enormous amounts of energy thinking about things you cannot directly control:

• Another person’s reaction.
• A client’s final decision.
• Whether someone agrees with you.
• What already happened.
• An unexpected change in circumstances.

That does not mean those things are unimportant.

It means your next decision is usually more productive when you ask:

“What part of this situation can I actually influence?”

You may be able to improve your preparation, communicate more clearly, ask another question, change your strategy, follow up, or decide how you respond.

Start there.

2. Progress Is Often More Useful Than Perfection

“Done is better than perfect” can be useful advice—but it needs context.

Some work genuinely requires precision.

But perfectionism becomes a problem when the standard keeps moving and nothing is ever ready enough to begin, submit, publish, or test.

Ask yourself:

“Does this need more work because the quality matters, or am I continuing because I am uncomfortable letting it go?”

There is an important difference.

This connects closely with The Difference Between Trying and Doing: effort becomes much more useful when it eventually turns into a concrete action or decision.

3. Pay Attention to Who Influences Your Thinking

You may have heard the popular saying that you are “the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

There is no need to treat that number as a scientific rule to recognize the larger point:

The people around you can influence what feels normal, possible, acceptable, or worth pursuing.

Think about the people whose opinions you regularly absorb.

• Do they challenge you thoughtfully?
• Can they disagree without tearing you down?
• Do they encourage responsibility?
• Do they tell you what you want to hear—or what may actually help?
• Do they model qualities you respect?

You do not need to surround yourself only with people who think exactly like you.

In fact, useful advice often comes from people who see something differently.

If you want to think more intentionally about that influence, read Who Inspires You to Be Better?

4. A Thoughtful “No” Protects Your Better Yeses

“Say no more often” is not necessarily good advice by itself.

The better principle is:

Be intentional about what you agree to.

Every commitment requires something:

• Time.
• Attention.
• Energy.
• Money.
• Follow-through.

Before automatically saying yes, ask:

• Do I actually have capacity for this?
• Does it support something important?
• What will receive less attention if I accept?
• Am I agreeing because I want to—or because I feel uncomfortable saying no?

A responsible no can sometimes protect your ability to keep the commitments you have already made.

5. You May Need to Start Before You Feel Completely Ready

There are situations where preparation is necessary.

You should not ignore training, information, safety, or legitimate risks just to prove that you are willing to take action.

But there are also moments when “getting ready” becomes indefinite.

You research one more option.

You rewrite the plan again.

You wait for confidence to arrive.

At some point, the next stage of learning requires action.

A better question than “Do I feel completely ready?” is:

“Am I prepared enough to take the next reasonable step?”

Good Advice Should Help You Think, Not Replace Your Thinking

Advice becomes dangerous when we treat it as an instruction simply because it came from someone successful, older, experienced, confident, or important to us.

The same advice can be useful for one person and completely wrong for another.

Before acting on advice, ask:

• Does this person understand my actual situation?
• Do they have relevant experience?
• What assumptions are behind their recommendation?
• What would be the downside if I followed it?
• Does it fit my goals, values, responsibilities, and constraints?

You are allowed to listen carefully and still make your own decision.

Ask for Advice More Intentionally

Sometimes the quality of the answer depends heavily on the quality of the question.

Instead of:

“What do you think?”

try asking:

• “What am I overlooking?”
• “What would concern you most about this plan?”
• “If you were in my position, what would you investigate before deciding?”
• “What part of this proposal would you strengthen?”
• “What mistake do people commonly make in this situation?”

Harvard Business Review describes seeking and giving advice as practical skills that can improve leadership and decision-making when they are approached thoughtfully.

Their article on the art of giving and receiving advice also emphasizes paying attention to the process—not simply collecting someone else’s opinion.

Do Not Ask Everyone

More advice is not always better advice.

If you ask ten people what to do, you may end up with ten conflicting recommendations and less clarity than when you started.

Choose advisers intentionally.

You might seek one person because they have technical experience, another because they know you well, or another because they understand the decision from a different perspective.

Then listen for reasoning, not just conclusions.

Turn Advice Into an Action

One of the easiest ways for good advice to disappear is to leave the conversation thinking:

“That was really helpful.”

And then do nothing differently.

After receiving advice you believe is useful, translate it into something specific.

Ask:

• What am I going to do differently?
• What is the first step?
• When will I do it?
• How will I know whether it helped?

For example:

Advice: “Stop agreeing to deadlines before checking your workload.”

Action: “Before accepting a new deadline, I will review my calendar and current commitments.”

The advice has now become a behavior.

This is closely connected to doing what you say you’re going to do: commitments become more reliable when you are intentional before making them and create a system for following through afterward.

Write Down the Advice You Want to Remember

Not every useful idea needs to become a rule for life.

But if someone tells you something that changes how you think, write it down along with a little context.

Record:

• The advice itself.
• Who shared it.
• Why it stood out.
• What situation you were facing.
• What you decided to do with it.
• What happened afterward.

A few months later, you may understand that advice very differently.

A Practical Tool for Capturing Ideas and Advice

If you like keeping useful ideas, meeting notes, lessons, and next actions in one place, a reusable Rocketbook notebook can be a practical option for capturing them as they come up and organizing what you want to revisit later.

The point is not to save every quote you hear.

Save the ideas that help you make better decisions—and especially the ones you intend to put into practice.

Use Advice to Interrupt Negative Patterns

Sometimes the most valuable advice helps you notice a pattern in your own thinking.

If you repeatedly assume the worst, dismiss progress, or focus only on what went wrong, a more deliberate reflection practice can help you challenge those habits.

The 7-Day Challenge for a Positive Mindset offers a structured way to notice negative patterns and experiment with a different response.

Put Useful Ideas Somewhere You Can Use Them

If planners, trackers, reflection sheets, and other printable tools help you turn ideas into action, you can explore the Efficiency Plan Etsy Shop.

The Takeaway

The best advice is not always the cleverest quote.

It is the advice that helps you see more clearly and act more intentionally.

Listen carefully.

Consider the source.

Ask good questions.

Decide whether the advice fits your situation.

And when it does, turn it into something you can actually do.

Advice becomes much more powerful when it changes something beyond the conversation.

So think about it:

What is the best advice you’ve ever received—and what did you do differently because of it?

— Ashley Everhart
Founder, Efficiency Plan