You’ll have this a lot in life, where someone (your mom) tells you, “You shouldn’t do XYZ and you think you know better than everyone else bla bla” as your dad sits on the side nodding along for moral support. 

Take dating for example. You’ll start dating someone, and your parents (Dating and parents are just a mashal. Any similarity is merely coincidental) tell you, “We don’t think this person is good for you because of XYZ, you can do so much better, you never listen to us and think you know better etc.” 

Some time goes by, and amazingly, your parents were right! Your relationship failed.

Some more time goes by and you start dating someone new. The same thing happens again with your parents, only this time they have the “I told you so” from your last failed relationship as evidence of their divine prophecy. 

Same thing again though. You break up and go through the whole, I told you so from scratch.

This happens a third time and rinse and repeat. Now your parents start looking at you going, “Are you really not going to listen to us, when we’ve never been wrong about any of the people you’ve dated?”

At this point you start doubting yourself and start thinking that it might be time to outsource your dating life to the people who know what they are talking about.

(1. I used parents and dating as the example, but this applies to every scenario that has the same dynamic. 2. There’s a difference between taking advice and taking orders from someone.)

Intuitively, this feels logical. If you’re batting 0 for 3, maybe you should start listening to the people who keep getting it right.  

The truth is though, that they are just playing the odds so they look like geniuses. The average person dates 7 people before they find the person they marry. Using this number, this means that there is an 86 percent chance that picking “No”, will be the right answer.  Playing the odds doesn’t mean you get to hand out life advice. Unless you get it correctly the one time that the answer is “Yes”, then every time you predicted “No”, was just a guess. Playing the odds doesn’t mean you get to hand out life advice.