Do you follow your own advice?

It's easier to speak wisdom than to live it

One trap in even the best advice is that it’s easier to say than to follow. We all know we should exercise more or eat healthier, but mostly we don’t! Why? Thinking about advice takes seconds, but following it well enough to see results can take months. Something similiar happens when we give advice to others. When we tell someone what to do, or how to do it, it’s easy to feel like we have it all figured out. That just thinking and saying clever things is the hard part. Somehow we regularly forget that the work and the sacrifice remains no matter how good the advice is.

All know the way, but few actually walk it. — Bodhidharma

Not much is known about the famous monk Bodhidharma. Did he follow the advice he is famous for? We don’t really know. Like many religious and spiritual figures the majority of what has survived history are stories and legends that are meaningful or inspiring to hear. Did he actually walk the way or just talk about it? Did he put the equivalent of the grocery store shopping cart back in the rack, or just leave it in annoying places in the parking lot? No one knows. Maybe he was a terrible neighbor or smelled funny. When we lionize our heroes we often take away their humanity. But it’s the weird, unlikeable and hypocritical parts of a person which might be the most instructive to learn from.

Recently I read a biography about one of my heroes, Alan Watts. He spent his lifetime teaching people how to understand themselves better and did it in delightful, fun and simple ways. For a long time I have wanted to think, live and teach like he did. Or at least the version of him I knew from his books and lectures.

Yet I was shocked when, in studying his life, I learned Watts was a lifetime alcoholic. He died young, likely due to complications from his addiction. How could this master of wisdom and self-knowledge have a failing like this? I could not understand it. He also was not much of a father, remarrying several times, and in his autobiography he dismissed the very idea of being particularly involved as a parent.

I’ve come to accept that there are mysteries to being a person. Someone like Alan Watts might be more interesting and instructive because of his failings, since we all have some. Life doesn’t always make sense or fit together in the perfect ways we are taught to expect. We don’t get to understand or know everything. Yet there is something about the nature of most advice that pretends we are more logical, poweful and rational creatures than we actually are.

What contradictions do you know about yourself? How have you avoided them? Or tried to integrate them and soften them? Or do you just tell others to do this and not do it yourself? :)

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Related Rule: #11 - Your values should cost you