You want to know the best advice you can ever get?

Before I tell you what the best advice ever is, I want to tell you what the worst advice that you could possibly get is.

1. Your friends will never understand you, trust me.

No matter how great your friends are — and believe me, I’ve got amazing friends in my life, I love them dearly, I think they’re some of the greatest men that have ever graced this planet.

They’re fully of empathy and compassion.

They have great advice for me. They are my go-to people.

You know who you are, Brett and Greg.

You’ve always been my go-to people, along with Larry and Jon. It forms a tribe of people I go to on a regular basis. I’m blessed to have amazing friends like this in my life.

Their advice is priceless.

But, and here’s a big but, even though their advice is priceless and their advice is some of the best advice I can ever get, the best advice they all give me is this:

2. A neutral person, an expert, is by far the best advice you’ll ever get.

I’ve been dealing with some personal issues over the last couple of years and my friends have guided me in such beautiful ways. But the one thing they all agree upon is I need to go and talk to somebody, talk to a professional about it. Talk to somebody who’s non-biased. Talked to somebody who’s an expert in that field, because that is the best advice you’ll ever get. If you pick an expert that’s really fucking smart.

If you pick an expert that’s really knowledgeable, that’s been around a long time, counseled a lot of people, helped a lot of people through the same thing, they’re going to give you that beautiful non-biased conversation you’re looking for and a blueprint for you to get past being stuck.

Your friends are amazing, but they’re just there to listen to you and guide you and give you advice. None of them are experts in what you’re asking for. They’re just friends, unless you’re talking to a friend about something where they are an absolute expert.

According to Malcolm Gladwell in the book Outliers, an expert is somebody that’s done something for 10,000 or more hours. That’s what really shocks me: when people go and they get advice or coaching from somebody who’s super young. I think to myself, they’ve barely been alive as an adult for 10,000 hours, yet people are getting advice from them. An expert is an outlier who’s literally coached and been around and spent 10,000 hours seeing every single scenario and working on their expertise.

Your friends haven’t done that, unless of course, what you’re asking them for is based on their expertise. So much of the time, your friends give advice because they love you.

They respect you and they don’t want to see you hurting.

We walk around all day long asking advice from so many different people hoping to find the right answer, because in reality, we’re all so cheap. We don’t want to spend the money on an expert. But in reality, spending the money on an expert actually creates so much more money in your life, because when you stop the constant circular talk inside your brain and inside your heart and you get the clarity from somebody who can guide you and give you that advice, the money that you spent will literally unlock so much more earning potential for you.

Once you clear whatever issues are really bugging you out in your life, you’ll all of a sudden take this heavy cloak of doom, or whatever it might be that’s been plaguing you, and you’ll be able to go and create and work and flourish again.

To find new relationships, new friendships, new work environments. Everything changes.

So, the best advice that I could ever give you is that if your stuck with something in your life, it’s alright to talk to friends, but go find an amazing expert, and get the clarity that you so need and so deserve in your life. Don’t look at the cost, look at the cost of what it’s going to cost you by not doing it.

Some food for thought today.