Advice to My Grandchildren

Lifelong Lessons for Gaining a More Peaceful Life through Better Receiving and Giving Advice

De: Donald Mitchell

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Did I actually write a book for only my own grandchildren? Well, of course, I didn’t. Rather, the book is primarily intended to be a loving and encouraging resource for all who would like to more wisely give or receive advice. By having focused on my beloved grandchildren as I wrote the book, however, I hope that my writing gained greater loving thoughtfulness, immediacy, and applicability beyond that which is often found in a typical “five steps to become a world-class brain surgeon” self-help book. I also wanted to establish a platform for multiple generations to consider the role of advice in some of the most important aspects of their lives, such as love, marriage, parenting, friends, role models, faith, education, and work.

I want you to experience life as though you were comfortably conversing in peace with family and friends while snugly sitting in front of a beautifully burning fireplace as a winter storm rages harmlessly outside sturdy, well-insulated walls.

Let’s not stop with finding peace. How about having better relationships and more love, connecting in more delightful ways with more people, drawing happily on faith, doing more good, learning more, and serving in ways that bring much benefit? All those are areas in which Advice to My Grandchildren will help you.

My fond goal is to help you to find some encouragement for and possibly clues to guide you in searching about a bit more than you might otherwise do in seeking and evaluating advice you receive … or before deciding what to advise others.

In these pages, you and I will closely examine the role of advice (in part by my describing and providing some) as one source for comfortably finding, choosing, and acting on better directions that enable us to feel peaceful even in most daunting circumstances. From such understanding, we should be able to understand much more about what is likely to follow from making and acting on a given choice, how to be more confident while making a choice, and how to be quite comfortable with the results.

Since we all receive advice (even if we are in the very small minority of people who never happen to give any suggestions to others), every topic in the book explores, in part, what to do with wanted, as well as with any unwanted, advice.

In terms of giving advice, : I start by sharing my experiences concerning a series of twelve commonly experienced life circumstances, followed by the advice (good, bad, and otherwise) that I gave (or would have given if I had been asked) related to those circumstances at three points in my life … as a young person, as a parent, and as a new grandparent … and end each chapter by evaluating my own prior advice to point out its good and not-so-good features as I now understand them. After considering these four perspectives, you should then add your own experiences and observations to draw further insights.