Advice is unfriendly to learning, especially when it is sought. Most of the time when people seek advice, they just want to be heard. Advice at best stops the conversation, definitely inhibits learning, and at worst claims dominance.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the paradox of seeking advice, suggesting that it may hinder true learning and communication.
Peter Block's quote emphasizes that when individuals seek advice, they often are not looking for guidance but rather a space to express their thoughts and be listened to. The act of giving advice can disrupt the natural conversation flow, potentially stifling deeper understanding and preventing personal insights from emerging, and in some cases, it can create a dynamic where the advisor is seen as more knowledgeable, thus claiming dominance in the interaction.
In practice
In a workshop about leadership, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of listening over simply giving directives.
Invitation is not only a step in bringing people together, it is also a fundamental way of being in a community. It manifests the willingness to live in a collaborative way. This means that a future can be created without having to force or sell it or barter for it. When we believe that barter or subtle coercion is necessary, we are operating out of a context of scarcity and self-interest, the core currencies of the economist.
Relationship and connectedness are the pre-condition for change. Every meeting, every process, every training program has to get people connected first. Otherwise the content falls on deaf ears. So small groups are an essential building block to any future you want to create.
Good questions work on us, we don't work on them. They are not a project to be completed but a doorway opening onto greater depth of understanding, actions that will take us into being more fully alive.
The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts.
How do you change the world? One room at a time. Which room? The one you're in.
We need to tell people not to be helpful. Trying to be helpful and giving advise are really ways to control others. ... Advice, recommendations, and obvious actions are exactly what increase the likelihood that tomorrow will be just like yesterday.
Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understand, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do [with great artists]; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.
If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angles, but am note nice, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but am not nice, I am nothing. If I give all I posses to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but am not nice, I gain nothing.
Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.
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