On Taking Suggestions

25 Apr, 2025

tl;dr - to be a better person maybe take other people's suggestions

This year, in robotics, one of the many things I did was beef with my managers (and my manager's managers). For me, there was always something to complain about -- whether it was the haphazardly made schedules that came out a few days before a big trip, or the lack of any centralized planning from our team captain or even weekly leads meetings to recap what happened each week and what the next week was based upon -- and that made robotics both frustrating and stressful; I wanted to win, I wanted to teach my trainees, I wanted to see the team be happy, but there's only so much I can do as the programming/software/strategy lead¹. Frustration came from not being able to do anything and having to watch our team spend time and basically crumble -- while not really having any agency or means (maybe?) to enact change. Stress came from trying to figure out how to try to win or salvage the season given how bad of a state we were in and the bleak outlook I predicted. Thus, overall, robotics wasn't really any fun.²

Besides telling my leads to "be better" and manage their time better or whatever (which is lowkey impossible by that point) (fun fact: leading a robotics team takes a lot of work, time, and energy), I think one thing I'd appreciate heavily is if my managers/leads took my suggestions somewhat seriously. I think I made a lot of suggestions that could've been beneficial for the team and while not all of them were sane, it is really discouraging when many suggestions that are good (in your eyes) are made yet none of them seem to even be reviewed or considered in the eyes of management. And that's what I think broke the camel's back in my scenario here -- not only was our team bad, it also seemed like all the suggestions and things I was doing to help the team (extra) really went to no avail and didn't end up helping the team at all.

Yet that's probably what people think of me. My friends and family (mostly my parents) give me many suggestions, some of which I take, some which I dismiss, and some which I ignore. But what makes my scenario different from the one in my robotics team is that (at least from my pov) I took suggestions. Although I didn't accept each one (and probably not the majority), I took the time to think about the costs and the benefits and come up with a reason why to reject said suggestions, rather than simply ignoring all suggestions outright³.

Ultimately, suggestions are meant to be helpful. Whether to suggest or to not and whether to take suggestions or to not is a personal choice, but if I'm suggesting and nothing seems to be coming out of it, I'm really heavily incentivized to stop (what is in my view) beneficial and constructive ways of improving life.
As such, I encourage you, the reader, (and me, the author) to consider other people's suggestions -- to take that time out of my day to think about what someone said and see if it really does help me or not. If the suggestion is helpful, implement it, thank the one who gave you it, and move on. If the suggestion is not, reject it, but also thank the suggestor for caring about you and giving you their insight. And whatever you do, and maybe the takeaway from this long rant is,

try not to scare off those that give you suggestions.⁴

If other people's suggestions are invaluable yet you've rejected so many suggestions so that no one cares about helping you, have you really won?