Have you ever asked a friend or family member an important question? Have they ever given you an answer that gave you a far from ideal output? Nobody is always right, and many are far from being so. When you need advice on a subject, asking more than one person is always beneficial, because nobody is always correct, and it helps play to the human nature of skepticism and truth-seeking.

Firstly, one must get advice from more than one person because it helps to weed out the truth. In ancient times, people used to think that the earth was flat, and that the sun orbited the earth. This was, of course, inherently wrong, and eventually disproven by astronomers. But we would still believe those things today, if everybody blindly followed other's advice. Instead, these astronomers pushed through the cries of heresy to find the truth. They were skeptics. Speculation and skepticism breed creativity and the need for truth, two essential facets of human existance. You may think that this is getting a bit off-topic, but it actually mirrors the topic at hand. We must be skeptical of others advice, for taking bad advice can be extremely detrimental. And what better way to find the truth than to find a collection of them, and pull from that the correct thing to do? A person should get advice from different people, because it plays to the natural human trait of skepticism, which has long been found to be the pathway to truth. But this isnt the only reason one should gather the advice of more than one person.

In the times of the Oregon trail, there was a family that wanted to go west, to find new land to settle on. Most people at the time would go on the Oregon trail, a mapped trail to get to the west. But a family friend told them that he knew a guide who had a much better, easier route. The guide took them about halfway through this 'route', and then informed them that he would have to head back, as he had more groups to take. Shortly thereafter, the trail became much harder. They had to abandon their horse and wagon, and eventually, winter caught up with them. Stuck in a cabin they had found, with no food or water, the family perished. This is only a heavily abridged version of the true story, as the full tale is much more gruesome. The moral, perhaps, is that even people you trust can give you bad, if well-meaning, advice. It is doubted that the family friend even knew how unrepputable the guide was, but he still gave them the advice that eventually led to their deaths. Sometimes, people think that they give good advice, but unbenownst to them, the advice isn't so good at all. If the family had asked more people, they might have lived through that fatal winter.

To recap, to get the best opinion on something, one must ask multiple people, as a single person may be wrong. if you are given multiple possible solutions, then you can find the best one and go with it. The author implores you, next time you are having a tough time making a decision, to ask multiple people, to do research on the solutions given, and to not die in a cabin in the dead of winter.