Find Your Music Team

Sep 15, 2026

I’ve received some wonderful advice in my life. I’ve also received quite a lot I didn’t ask for. I suspect most of us have.

People tell us what worked for them, what they wish they had done differently and what they think we should do next. We read books, listen to podcasts, seek out experts and talk to people whose judgment we trust. Sometimes a single piece of advice changes the way we see something completely.

That’s one of the great advantages of not having to figure everything out for ourselves. Other people know things we don’t know. They have experiences we haven’t had, expertise we haven’t developed and perspectives we simply cannot see from where we’re standing. Listening to them can save us time, help us avoid mistakes and introduce us to possibilities we might never have considered. So I’m a great believer in listening.

But I’m beginning to think there’s an important distinction between listening to advice and accepting instruction.

Advice is offered from somewhere. It comes through another person’s experiences, values, circumstances, successes, disappointments and understanding of the world. Even excellent advice has a context. And then it lands with us.

We have our own circumstances, values, strengths, responsibilities, ambitions and ways of seeing things. So perhaps the question isn’t simply whether the advice is good. It’s what happens when that advice meets the reality of who we are.

Sometimes it fits immediately. Someone says something and we recognize the truth of it almost before they’ve finished speaking. Sometimes we need to sit with it for a while. Sometimes we try it, adapt it and discover that one part is enormously useful while another simply doesn’t work for us. And sometimes we listen carefully, appreciate the intention and decide not to take it at all.

None of those responses makes the advice worthless.

I think we sometimes treat advice as though accepting it is evidence that we listened properly, while choosing differently means we ignored it. But perhaps good listening is more active than that. It requires us to consider what we’ve heard, question it, test it against what we know and remain open to the possibility that it may challenge something we thought we knew about ourselves.

That last part matters. “That’s just not me” can become its own kind of trap if we use it to dismiss anything uncomfortable or unfamiliar. Other people can see our blind spots. They can challenge our assumptions. Sometimes the advice we most resist is exactly the advice we need to hear.

So this isn’t about trusting ourselves instead of trusting other people. I’m not sure those two things need to compete. Perhaps it’s about becoming better at both.

We can seek out people who know more than we do and listen carefully to what they have to say. We can remain curious enough to experiment with an idea before deciding whether it works for us. We can allow ourselves to be challenged without assuming that every challenge requires us to change direction.

Advice can inform our choices without making them for us.

And perhaps that’s one of the quieter benefits of knowing ourselves well. We don’t have to close our ears to protect who we are. We can listen more openly because we have somewhere within ourselves from which to respond.

So listen widely. Ask questions. Learn from people who know things you don’t. Let them surprise you, challenge you and occasionally change your mind.

Just remember: advice is something to consider, not an instruction to follow.