What is the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you?

Why this question works

The wording is the clever part. Asking "what is your advice?" puts a modest person on the spot. Asking what advice they received lets them pass along something valuable while giving the credit to someone else: a father, a sergeant, a first boss, a neighbor. It feels less like preaching and more like sharing, so the answer comes easily.

You also get two things for the price of one. You get the advice itself, which has been tested across a whole lifetime and kept because it worked. And you get the story of the moment it was given: where they were, what trouble they were in, how long it took them to realize the person was right. That story is what makes the advice stick. A sentence like "measure twice, cut once" is a cliche on a poster. From your grandpa, with the ruined board and the patient uncle attached, it is something you will remember when you need it.

How to ask it

Ask at a moment when you could use some advice yourself, and say so. Before a new job, a move, a wedding or a big decision, the question is completely natural, and your grandparent will take it seriously because you plainly mean it.

Listen all the way through, and then ask who said it and when. Find out whether they followed the advice right away or learned the hard way first; the honest answer is usually the second, and it is the better story. Write the advice down in their exact words. Do not tidy the phrasing. The way they say it is part of what you are keeping.

Other ways to word it

• What is the wisest thing anyone ever told you?
• Whose advice do you still hear in your head?
• What is a piece of advice you are glad you listened to?
• What did your mother or father always tell you?

Follow-up ideas

• Who gave you that advice?
• What was going on in your life at the time?
• Did you take it right away?
• When has it helped you most?
• Was there advice you ignored and wish you had not?
• What is the worst advice anyone ever gave you?
• What advice have you passed on to your own children?

An example answer

This is an invented example, written to show the kind of detail to listen for. Your grandpa’s answer will be his own.

"My first foreman told me, 'Do not make a permanent decision on a bad day.' I was nineteen, and I had just had a row with another fellow on the crew, and I marched into the office to quit. He did not argue with me. He just said that, and told me to come back in the morning and quit then if I still wanted to."

"Of course by morning I did not want to. I stayed eleven years. I have used that rule my whole life. I did not sell the house the year the roof leaked. I did not say the thing I wanted to say to your grandmother's sister at that one Thanksgiving. Sleep on it, and decide when the sun is out. It is not fancy. But I have never once been sorry that I waited a day, and I can think of a few times I was sorry I did not."

What to write down

Write the advice down exactly as your grandparent says it, in quotation marks. Underneath, record who gave it, where and when, and what was happening at the time. Add one or two occasions when it helped. Note any advice they have passed on to their own children. Keep the page somewhere you can find it before your next big decision.

A question like this one opens the life lessons chapter of the Tell Me Your Story journals for grandparents, on a page of its own. In their handwriting, the advice becomes something you can open and reread whenever a big decision comes along.

See the Tell Me Your Story, Grandpa journal or the Tell Me Your Story, Grandma journal. For more ideas, read questions to ask your grandparents or browse advice and life lessons questions.