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" Last summer in the Detroit airport, I found myself drunk, in the half-light of evening, staring at this coffee mug with phrases written on one side. It took a moment before I understood what I was looking at: a cup with eleven different pieces of advice written on it, shopping-list fashion. First among them: Go for long walks. I spoke involuntarily, directly into the fluid hubbub of that store. What I said to the coffee mug was: &amp;quot;Eat me.&amp;quot; I have plenty of coffee mugs. Ten maybe. More. Yet for some reason, there I was, swaying from one foot to the other the way I do when I drink too much sake, about to buy a mug that gave me pithy, perky, predictable, trite advice on how to live. Question your assumptions. Loosen up. Scream. This shit was making me squint in puzzlement. Indulge yourself with hot baths. Live for the moment. Pabulum and clich\u00E9s. I rolled it over in my hands, mumbled something like, &amp;quot;Yeah, yeah,&amp;quot; then, inexplicably, walked to the cashier with it and paid as if I were buying a laxative, with a blend of legitimate embarrassment and scripted indifference. I even had it gift wrapped so I could be clear it wasn&amp;#039;t for me. Go for long walks. Jesus.  In the mornings thereafter, I looked at that mug, with its sentiments piled line by line like so much dry, aphoristic kindling, and snatched it from my cupboard like a jar of vitamins. I&amp;#039;d stare at it while checking my e-mail or reading the box scores. I&amp;#039;m staring at it even now. Bunch of bullshit is what I think. It irks me. But I now understand why I bought it, why it enchanted me so. I was low. The usual laundry list of woes for a forty-six-year-old guy: My dad was dying. I was beginning to hate my job. My chest hurt all the time. I&amp;#039;d gained weight. I needed a little advice, but I was only willing to go so far as to get it from a mug. All day long you hear gentle imperatives. Take care. Chin up! Be good. These are really recommendations, just more crap like those lines on the mug, about how to see that day, how to get through. They imply a shared sense of difficulty and danger in the world around us, a mutuality of purpose. It&amp;#039;s advice, but I generally write it off as chatter. A woman whom I like very much, the secretary of a good friend, recently greeted me and offered this: &amp;quot;Smile more!&amp;quot; When I screwed up my eyes and hissed &amp;quot;Why?&amp;quot; she broke into tears. It&amp;#039;s like that with me.  If, over the course of a month, you were to really pay attention, you might receive -- on all frequencies -- thirty pieces of advice per day. In a month, you&amp;#039;d have near a thousand words of wisdom. But real wisdom is scarce. Where do you get good advice? At church? From your family? And how do you sort through all the rest? Would I even follow that advice if I could find it? And what would it get me? Here&amp;#039;s what I hoped it would get me: information. Intelligence. An edge over the next guy, who didn&amp;#039;t take the time to solicit it. My theory was: You need help? It&amp;#039;s out there. Ask enough people what they think and sooner or later you&amp;#039;re going to walk away with a plan you wouldn&amp;#039;t have come up with on your own. And you never know who&amp;#039;s going to give it to you. So I did my thing. I bought a pad and recorded -- and tried to live by -- every piece of advice I got for one month. No matter how simple, no matter how complex. I ruled out advertisements, commercials, and Dr. Phil. If the person wasn&amp;#039;t giving the advice directly to me, for me, I was going to treat it as noise. I put the mug away. The timing was good. I was in the thick of a tough phase at work, considering quitting, moving on to another university. I would have a story to tell people. It would beg for input.  But I got nothing. Not on the first day, not on the second. The world, which seemed previously to offer advice in a noisy, wretched chorus every day of my life -- on barstools, in fortune cookies, on the golf course -- was suddenly silent. Then on the third day, a gigantic, ruddy college sophomore grabbed my arm as I slipped on the ice outside my office. &amp;quot;Take it easy there,&amp;quot; he said. So I went inside and wrote that down. Take it easy. An Eagles song. One evening, the security guard in my building, rattling his huge ring of keys, asked how it -- things, life, the job -- was going. Standing there in the glow of the exit sign, I answered him truthfully. I told him I was thinking about leaving, the whole bit. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t beat yourself up about it,&amp;quot; he said. There you go! Item two. Not much better than the bromides on the coffee mug, but it was something.  &amp;quot;When I left my wife, I was kicking myself for two years,&amp;quot; he said. He shook his head, took a long look down the hall. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t worry about blame. There&amp;#039;s always enough blame.&amp;quot; Don&amp;#039;t worry about blame. I was hearing something now. I had been digging, yanking wisdom from every corner of the everyday. Lunches. Dinners. Cups of coffee. I told my story again and again, and no one seemed to be able to really help. After a couple of weeks, I was actively negotiating a new job offer. But the more specific my needs became, the more people said things like &amp;quot;Change is tough.&amp;quot; I wasn&amp;#039;t getting advice, just the bland truths we comfort ourselves with. There&amp;#039;s nothing wrong with this stuff. It just wasn&amp;#039;t actionable, and it wasn&amp;#039;t helping me get far enough ahead in the world to be worth the effort. I tried like hell to take it easy and not beat myself up, and did my best to forget about blaming people, but I was getting pissed. I started writing down whole lines of dialogue so that I could read them later and find the advice. My list grew: Be careful. Always drive with your lights on. Lift with your knees. Scrub your sink every day. Always pay for food with cash. One guy told me to wash my hands thirty times a day. I washed my hands raw. Late in my experiment, the offer for the other job was on the table. I had an appointment with my boss the next morning. My car was at Jerry&amp;#039;s Foreign Auto, and I walked down to get it. It was a longish walk through a heavy snowfall. I appreciated the quietude, the relative lack of traffic. I decided that I would ask Jerry, my mechanic, what the hell I should do. By now it was more than an experiment. I really needed advice. I thought, Jerry&amp;#039;s smart, right? I trusted him. I stomped the snow off my feet and sat down in his office, at a large wooden table where guys from town play cribbage. I explained my circumstances, the weight of one job against another, the expectations of my children, my girlfriend, my family. He sat down, and together we cursed out the right people and laughed. I rambled, angry and anxious, until my heart was thumping. Jerry looked at me sideways, then leaned back. &amp;quot;Here&amp;#039;s the thing: Always take an extra week with big decisions,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t do anything rash.&amp;quot; Then he wiped his hands with a rag. When you listen to enough advice, when you really pay attention, you start to know when you are in the presence of the real thing. Now, you never asked me how to get good advice, but you&amp;#039;ve read this far, so let me give you a little of the real thing: When asking for advice, choose your moments -- which means don&amp;#039;t ask until you are ready to listen. Be curious. Don&amp;#039;t ask for the sake of asking, to convince yourself that you&amp;#039;re doing your due diligence or something, when in fact you have no intention of really hearing. Go first to the most stable person you know -- your Jerry, someone with no stake in the outcome, someone smart, someone who doesn&amp;#039;t give a damn if you follow his advice or not. And the last thing is: Don&amp;#039;t wait to hear something you expected to hear. Don&amp;#039;t go into it looking for affirmation. Forget your gut, even if only for a moment. Shut up. Listen. I thanked Jerry, then called my boss and asked for the extra week. Jerry told me he needed fifteen more minutes with my car, and I bundled up for the door. He wanted me to wait. &amp;quot;Just hang on,&amp;quot; he said, and I could hear advice in that, too, like a church bell ringing. I told him I&amp;#039;d be back later. When I opened the door, the snow whipped in and swirled between us. &amp;quot;You walking?&amp;quot; he said.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not so bad.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Long walk.&amp;quot; He was right. But, as I told him, I need a long walk now and then. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/money/advice/a3119/influence0707/>