Knowing yourself means knowing which advice to skip, even when it’s great advice for someone else.

Most advice is a description of what worked for one person in their situation, handed over as a rule. It can be completely correct and still wrong for you, because the conditions are different. The hard part is that good advice sounds authoritative, so skipping it feels like arrogance. It is not arrogance if you can say specifically why your situation differs.

Next time strong advice lands on you, ask what it assumes about your circumstances and whether those assumptions hold. Take the piece that survives. Thank the person and skip the rest, without needing to argue them out of it.