Speaking Part 2 你收過的建議 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a piece of advice you received that was useful.

You should say:

• what the advice was
• who gave it to you
• when you received it
• and explain why this advice was useful.

¹ The most useful piece of advice I've ever been given came from my first manager, a woman called Ms. Lin, on my very last day at my first proper job in Taipei. ² I'd just handed her my resignation letter and was feeling guilty about leaving — I'd only been there for two years, and I genuinely thought I was letting her down.

³ What she said to me, almost in passing as we walked out for lunch, was this: "Don't confuse loyalty to a company with loyalty to your career." ⁴ She went on to explain that companies, however well-intentioned, are systems that optimise for their own survival, and that nobody else was going to look after the long arc of my career except me. ⁵ I remember being slightly stunned, partly because she was the manager and was effectively telling me it was healthy to leave her team.

⁶ The reason this advice has stayed with me is that it arrived at exactly the moment I was prepared to hear it. ⁷ I'd been raised in a fairly traditional Taiwanese household where staying with one employer for a long time was treated as a sign of character, and her sentence cut through that assumption in about ten words. ⁸ It also gave me explicit permission, from someone older and more experienced, to think strategically about my own future without feeling selfish.

⁹ Five years on, I've changed jobs twice more, and each time I hear her voice in the back of my head whenever the guilt creeps in. ¹⁰ It's quite a specific gift, actually — not "follow your passion" or any of the usual platitudes, but a single, slightly cynical, completely practical sentence. ¹¹ I think the best advice often is.

The most useful piece of advice I've ever received came from my father, on the night before I started university. He didn't make a big speech — he just said, "Whatever you study, learn how to teach yourself."

A piece of advice that's stuck with me came from my high-school art teacher, who said something quite blunt during our final critique: "Stop trying to be impressive. Try to be specific."

Strangely, the most useful piece of advice I've ever been given came from someone I met once and never saw again — a stranger I sat next to on a flight from Tokyo back to Taipei.