Everyone is going to have an opinion about your creative work
Let’s focus on the genuine advice.
Not all feedback is created equal.
It feels weird saying that too much advice can be a bad thing. The fact that people are giving us advice at all is awesome, but not all advice is created equal.
Advice comes from: experience, creativity, opinion, and or adoration.
And also comes from extreme places: jealousy, fear, caution, recklessness, and a bunch of other emotions they might not know they are pumping out.
An older, wiser person who has been through what you are experiencing or something similar should have more weight than an older person who has never been through it. Experience doesn’t always necessarily mean the advice is correct (advice stuck in the past, for example) but it does have weight and value.
Advice can be tricky to verify, because you don’t always know where the advisor is coming from (experience or opinion? both?).
I think experience and creativity have a higher level of quality than opinion or adoration.
The biggest place where advice loses its equality is in opinion.
A hundred people’s opinion on what you should do will be all over the place.
One person will tell you that you should do X. Another person will tell you that you should do the opposite of X.
The thing that can cut through most advice is making your own decisions.
Taking advice doesn’t mean you have to follow it.
We ultimately decide what’s best for us and for our work.
If a hundred opinionated people give you hundreds of things to try, you have no obligation to do it. Listen, then decide what you think is best.
And if someone experienced gives you advice, it’s always good to pause and take it honestly. then consider how and if it applies to your life.
STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner
Daily Blog #530
