Taking My Own Advice

There’s a certain irony to handing out advice.

In building my mentoring program for Acuity, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about advice, systems, and strategies I’d hand to high school students. It’s taken me nearly 3 years of chipping away to just start getting the hang of it. Such an exercise is difficult, certainly, but—as I’m reminded very frequently—living that same advice is an even harder proposition.

After all, the land of the theoretical is a simple one. You can take your thoughts, bottle them up into a test tube, and pass the formula along. But, from my experience, prescribing solutions for others is far easier than taking that medicine yourself. It can also feel dangerously gratifying.

Optimising things on paper injects you with a feeling of being in control. Having things figured out. As a side effect, complacency can bleed into your own life. If you’ve distilled a certain challenge down into a system, well, now you can forget about it, right?

Sometimes I found that the very things I preach through my business are those facets I tend to stray from most often. I might have it somewhat sorted on the page, but not on the experiential level. I never will. Does that invalidate what I’ve been teaching? No, I don’t think so at all. Practicing what you preach is not so simple. The fact that I struggle to adhere to my own lessons is not only expected, but also holds an important silver lining.

Even if you know what to do, actually doing it is endlessly more complex and challenging. In this way, it validates my idea behind creating a mentoring program in the first place. The concepts—study skills, or ways of managing your time, or building habits—are not revolutionary, but having someone in your corner, through it all, can be.

I feel incredibly grateful that the work I pour the most amount of my time into reflects a lot of lessons straight back at me. It’s constantly a work in progress, and so am I.