You will succeed when you execute Powerful Advice

We think of advice as a suggested course of action coming from other people, from our environment. However we are most often our own advisors - we talk to ourselves before we reach a decision.

People think that the Decision is important; rather, it is the advice that precedes it.

We judge advice. It comes in four flavors: Neutral, Bad, Good, and Powerful.

Let us consider advice that is executed to reach a desirable outcome.

Neutral Advice is outside our taste buds. It is yet to be evaluated even if it is in our field of view; is floating outside of our zone. It can turn into Good, Bad, or Powerful.

Bad Advice is inappropriate and causes failure. We know it too well to dwell on it further.

Good Advice is wisdom, or wise rules. Good advice can turn out to be bad advice.

Powerful Advice is appropriate advice or "right" advice. When executed, it causes a multiplier effect. Fits exactly for our situation, fits exactly for our ability to execute. Aligns favorably with future events. Fills our sails to push us to Victory. You will succeed when you execute Powerful Advice.

For example: President Roosevelt received Powerful Advice from his advisors when they told him to risk devoting precious resources to develop the atomic bomb. From the American point of view, the war was over in days - but more importantly, America and other nuclear powers became dominant and unassailable from that point onwards, even today. Hitler ignore the same advice from Von Weizsäcker, his scientist.

Powerful Advice is always judged to be Good in hindsight. Good Advice if inappropriate, can turn out Bad and is not always Powerful. Neutral Advice can turn into Powerful Advice.

For example: President Bush was advised to go it alone in Iraq after they swept through in 19 days. The huge oil fields would free America forever from dependency on the Arab world. It was Good Advice, but inappropriate. So became Bad Advice. My advice was (in a rubbished letter to the local Editor but with no one to listen), turn it over to the United Nations so they would enlist muslim nations as peace keepers. End of Insurgency. This was from observing India's eerily similar and failed adventure in Sri Lanka in the 1980s - which resulted in Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's assasination by a suicide bomber. It was likely appropriate advice and so may even have been powerful - if executed.

From my earlier lament: Good Advice is a storehouse of wisdom. Individual or Collective. Our minds try to make sense of the past and try to function in the present to maximise selfish survival and prosperity by generating rules. These rules are based upon our experiences, education, upbringing, beliefs etc. Good Advice is simply rules and patterns extrapolating into the future. Because the future is unpredictable, so Good Advice may not always be right.

Powerful Advice is hard to recognize and is not the domain of the clever, educated, or even successful. Ordinary people may possess it at times.

For example: Wilma was a poor, black girl with polio, growing up in segregated America in the 1950s.She could not walk without braces until age 11. Good Advice would have told her to find fulfillment in the Arts or to be content with her lot in life. However from accounts, she watched her sister run on the track, and Powerful Advice within her, told her to run, too. Wilma Rudolph won the title of the "World's Fastest Woman" and became the first American woman to win 3 gold medals in the Olympics.

So, what are your thoughts on how to recognise and sieze Powerful Advice?