At what age should you stop considering career advice from others?
Presumably when you are old enough, you would know your strengths and weaknesses better than anyone else — and so you would be the best person to give yourself career advice.
Never!
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
Smart ppl learn from their mistakes, wise ppl learn from the mistakes of others.
Entertain every thought that comes your way, accept only the ones that make sense to you & take responsibility for your actions.
It looks like I’m in a tiny minority.
Sure, I you want to follow a well trodden “career path” then follow advice until the day you retire. I can see how that makes sense in academia, or medicine.
If not, my advice is to stop taking advice from day 1, which may include this message :-)
Careers are so 1990.
Almost everyone has an agenda. One subconscious agenda is “I spent years following this path. You should also go through all the steps, so I can feel that my path was justified”. Most people’s advice is from a sample size of 1, or maybe 20 from close family and friends. It’s small, it’s historical, and it’s no basis upon which to make your own life decisions. Much like relationship advice.
As another poster said - curate advice very carefully.
I’ve been at it for 30 years and I still need career advice and actively seek it out. There does come a point where it’s not as easy to find folks with as senior experience as you have, but the folks I took advice from when I was young aged with me and their advice is still useful as they have already gone through my stage of career. The key becomes finding those people that seem to be able to distill experiences in ways that are insightful and are rigorously self reflective, then nurturing your relationships with those people to be sure you don’t lose touch.
Finally I would say at a certain point you learn about your career as much by helping others more junior navigate their own. As you give them advice you realize things about your own experience that are profound for yourself that you wouldn’t have analyzed as deeply without the prompting.
I'm almost 50 and still listen to all available advice. I don't blindly follow it, but I listen to the perspectives people share and synthesize it with my own self-knowledge. You never know when someone will have something unique to say that can lead you in a good direction, no matter how old you or they happen to be.
I don't know everything there is to know about myself. I may know myself better than anyone else, but I still have blind spots, places where I rationalize, maybe even places where I just don't want to look. Others may see parts of me more clearly than I do.
And, others know parts of the world out there better than I do. What's it like to work at company X? I don't know; others do. What are current trends in interviewing? I haven't interviewed in over a decade; others have. What's it like trying to get hired when you're over 60? Well, last time I tried, I wasn't over 60. And so on.
Everybody's got something to learn. And the more you think you know, even about yourself, the more you should listen to others. You may be selectively excluding other points of views just because they make you feel uncomfortable with yourself.
Your post sounds like a rent. Have you felt offended by someone else's opinion on you?
Never, but as I have gotten older I'm more particular on where I get my advice from. Also, I have realized that people only react to what I tell them. They never know the whole picture. At the end of the day, you make your career decisions and not them.
There are fairly few events in one’s person’s careers, so even though you may know yourself, you don’t know much about all the places you haven’t worked at, all the people you haven’t worked with, and all the situations you haven’t been in.
And so is true of all the people you may take advice from.
So the best is to take as many advice as you can, and decide if you want to follow them or not.
If 100 people you know and/or find smart and have experience tell you that the move you are considering is a bad idea, it’s probably best to follow that advice. It may be that all of them are wrong, and you can still ignore them if you want, but you know at least you will be aware that most people think it’s a bad idea…
You should always consider it. You don't have to follow it, listening and evaluating someone's advice as it applies to your situation can be valuable.
Never.
You never stop learning, nor will you ever know everything.
The older you get, the more ingrained in your biases you become. I'd say you should take advice MORE as you get older.
only listen to advice from people who sufficiently understand the context for which you need advice. be it from a stranger who has done what youre trying to do, or a close friend or family member who knows the nuances of your life rather well, there is probably something you can gain from considering their perspective.
as others mentioned, the why someone is offering advice is critically important. Is it because something about your situation is jarring to them, given some knowledge they have that you lack? if so, pay close attention to the advice and where it is coming from. Is it from a misunderstanding of your situation, a generic platitude, or just some content to fill up time and space? probably best to consider it very lightly or ignore it completely.
You'll never be wise enough to not consider career advice; you just get better at curating it.
I think one should always listen and seek out advice, but in the end always go with our own gut. As we gain experience, we will get better and better at filtering out which advice is better ignored and which should be implemented in some form.
Never. There's always something to learn from others of all ages. I try to always keep a "beginner's mind" for everything I do.
If for teenagers, I will say they stop receiving advice from parents except they choose same region
places like the bay area and los angeles are full of boomers turned coaches looking to profit from the tech generations by selling them all kinds of career / life / self help / relationship advice. if it wasn’t enough you need to pay them a cool 2 million for a shit shack they bought in the 80s for 70k, now they will reprogram you into thinking you need them. be careful and consider the possibility you know more than you think you do.
Age zero. Fat people have the most diet advice.