Lying, Voltron, Good/bad Advice

I think every piece of good advice or wisdom as at least one (usually more) downsides. These downsides almost always occur when people listen to the piece of wisdom above their own common sense and personal experience. The simple solution then is just to take all pieces of wisdom and advice and subordinate them to the questions:
"is this applicable and important to me, now?"
"Does this seem correct, given my own best common sense?"
"Does this seem to be creating something positive or negative in my life?"

The problem with "advice" is that people and situations are different. Even great wisdom can lead someone down a self-destructive path, if their understanding and application are different than what the speaker intended. You are the final gate that decides to do or not do something. Ultimately the responsibility for doing something that messes up your life falls on you. You can blame it on the person who gave you bad advice, but unless they were intentionally lying to you

(This is a cool tv show based on Paul Ekman's research)

or totally inept, (and ultimately even then) you are responsible for deciding if it applies to you and whether to practice it. You are responsible for figuring out how to do the practice or behavior effectively.

Not blame, not shame. Just responsible. It's actually a good thing. It means you have a degree of power over this. Though if you don't recognize that fact, things tend to behave as though you don't have power.

It's like a puppeteer who pretends his puppet is alive, and his puppet is his boss, and then he forgets its an act and starts feeling dejected and stressed and powerless, running around doing what the puppet-boss says.

This is a general preamble to any advice I or anyone else gives, but the specific thing that I've been chewing on with pleasant results is choice and decision. Specifically, I'm trying to be more aware that whenever I make a choice to do something, that I am simultaneously making a choice not to do any other things. So the question automatically comes up: "Is this the most valuable use of my time?"

I get home, I'm tired, part of me wants to watch some Voltron

and eat snacks.

Then I ask myself: "if you do that, it means those minutes and hours are not going to anything else. Are you sure there's nothing else you'd rather decide to be doing with that time?"

And of course the answer is no, there are lots of other things that are really important to me, and if I had to choose (which I do, but I tend to not realize it.) I would certainly pick one of the other things that is earth-shatteringly important to me, like organizing my room and work flow so I can do all the other things I need to, or taking care of the most time sensitive projects and actions, so they don't become more complex, expensive and/or time consuming because I put them off too long. Or taking a nap because I'm too tired to do anything else productive.

I don't think this would work for most people, perhaps I've laid some good ground work somewhere along the line, but for me, for now, it's pretty awesome in focusing me like a magnifying glass with the sun, turning my attention into a brilliant point that illumines and burns away whatever it looks at.

It makes me think of The Marshmallow Test, a book about research on willpower, and some of the cognitive reappraisal strategies that seemed to be most effective in helping people overcome immediate temptations for long-term rewards.

OK, it seems abrupt, but I'm done. Done and out. What's most important now, is sleep. :D

(I wrote this close to a week ago, but this was the second one that week, so it is fulfilling this weeks quota, and I'm waiting til today, Sunday, to add a few pictures and inform the facebook crowd that it is posted.)