There was a time when I treated advice like instruction.
If someone older, more experienced, more successful said something confidently, I assumed it was universally true. I collected sentences from mentors, authors, founders, philosophers, and tried to apply them directly to my life.
Some of it helped.
Some of it quietly distorted me.
It took me years to realize something simple and unsettling: most advice is autobiography.
When someone tells you what you should do, they are usually describing what worked for them. Their timing. Their temperament. Their fears. Their blind spots. Their luck. Their environment. Their wounds.
Advice rarely arrives as pure principle. It arrives shaped by experience.
I once received two completely opposite pieces of advice about risk. One person told me to move fast, take bold bets, jump before feeling ready. Another insisted on caution, stability, careful sequencing.
Both were successful. Both were confident. Both were convincing.
Later, I learned something about their histories.
The first had grown up with very little and built everything from scratch. Speed was survival. The second had experienced a painful failure early in life that cost more than money. Caution was protection.
Neither was wrong.
They were speaking from memory.
Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards. Advice is almost always backward facing. It is a person trying to compress years of lived experience into a sentence. They are mapping their past onto your future.
That map does not always fit your terrain.
I have caught myself doing the same thing. Offering advice that felt wise, only to realize later that I was describing my own coping strategy, not universal truth. I was projecting what I needed at a certain time onto someone else’s completely different situation.
Advice feels objective. It rarely is.
It carries the shape of the adviser’s personality. A naturally disciplined person will preach structure. A naturally intuitive person will preach instinct. Someone who regrets missed chances will encourage boldness. Someone scarred by risk will encourage restraint.
Even success stories are selective. People narrate their lives in ways that make sense to them. They highlight certain causes, downplay others, emphasize lessons that align with how they want to see themselves.
None of this makes advice useless.
It makes it contextual.
The mistake is treating advice as law instead of lens. Instead of asking, “Is this true?” a better question might be, “True for whom? Under what conditions? At what stage?”
Wisdom is not in blindly following advice. It is in filtering it.
Marcus Aurelius constantly reminded himself that every opinion is limited by perspective. He trained himself to examine the source before absorbing the statement. That habit matters more today than ever.
We live in an era flooded with guidance. Podcasts, books, threads, frameworks. Everyone has a formula. Everyone has a path.
But your life is not their autobiography.
When someone gives advice, listen carefully. Not just to what they are saying, but to who they are. Notice the patterns. Notice the biases. Notice the experiences underneath the sentence.
Then turn inward.
Does this align with who I am?
Does this fit my context?
Does this reflect my values?
Most advice is autobiography.
The real work is writing your own.
