Advice that changed my life

Earlier today I read this article (Why Online Self-Help Gurus Like Tim Denning are Full of Shit). I think the story is a little too aggressive but I kind of agree with its premise. I think giving advice to adults is useless. In the vast majority of difficult situations — be they in business or relationships — we will go with our own instincts and emotions, whether they are right or wrong. The change, if it happens, comes from within. For example, we’ve exhausted all of our resources and have no choice but to give up on some struggling business or relationship; or we make a conscious and independent decision to change the course, to change something in our lives. In most situations, no one — not Tim Denning, not our parents, not our partners — have the power to influence us. The change comes from within. That’s why I’m very skeptical of any advice, in whatever plane of life.

So I was going to write a more detailed story on why most advice is useless. But then I remembered an episode from my younger years when someone’s advice proved life-changing. In “younger years”! Perhaps that’s the life stage when the power advice is most potent.

It was around 1997. I was 16 or 17, about halfway through my four-year stay at Stowe, an elite boarding school in England. How I ended up in England, after a year in America (Kansas and Oklahoma!) is a separate story, but end up I did. That’s what rich Russian parents did in the first post-Soviet decade and I am sure they do even more these days — send their kids to expensive boarding schools, especially in…