Jeff writes:

I recently had a very bad argument with a friend of mine.  He has been hanging out too much and not really focusing on his career and I decided to tell him that I thought he was not working hard enough and trying to find the easy route to success.  Of course he didn't really appreciate what I had to say, and told me I was just a bitter angry person.

I really do care about this person and I do want them to succeed.  I really thought I was doing the right thing by raising some issues with him, but now he is isn't speaking to me and I think I may have destroyed our friendship.  Our last conversation ended pretty badly with him saying that I should not be giving him any advice because I "had no life".  I returned the insults with a few of my own.

I am not sure why I care so much about what this person does with his life.  I guess it is really none of my business in the first place and that I should've just kept my thoughts to myself.  Is it wrong to give advice to friends or is it better just to mind your own business?

MR. GOODADVICE RESPONDS:

You should only really give advice to people who are asking for it.  For the most part people are quite capable of living their lives without any real direction from anyone else.  We each have to follow our own hearts in life and what may seem like something bad to the outsider may actually make that individual very happy.  

It is not wrong to care about someone else or to want them to have a good life.  It is however a tremendous waste of energy to try and impose your way of life on another person.  Hey, we all do things in life that other people may not approve of and yet we do them most often because it makes us happy or out of necessity.  Nobody sets out to live life wrong.

It is best to focus our energy on our own happiness.  Forget about your friend if what he is doing is making you nuts.  It's your life that matters and you should be trying to surround yourself with people that bring joy into your world.  It's not always easy to end a friendship but sometimes it just has to happen.   Here you are so concerned about your friend wasting his potential and its probably causing you more stress then it is him.  He is probably very happy.  He is probably not worried about these issues in his life.  So why are you suffering for something that is not concerning him in the least?  It doesn't make sense does it?

Go out and do something for yourself today.  Don't think about your friend's life, go enjoy your own.   It seems you may have allowed yourself to fall into a rut where you are playing the role of big brother where it isn't wanted, or maybe not even needed.  Your friend will learn life's lessons on his own and he will be just fine.  It's more important that you be fine as well.