The Brittle Nature of Borrowed Advice

30.06

We often treat advice like a commodity.

We package it, brand it, and scale it—the five-step formula, the morning routine, the rule that saved them. It’s clean, it’s tweetable, and it fits neatly on a magazine cover.

I’ve always loved wisdom, and I collect it the way some people collect art. But it took me a while to realize that borrowed light only gets you so far.

Because even the most profound advice can be misleading. When ripped from its context, it turns brittle. It is no longer profound. It has become a broken idea.

Financial advisors are wired to protect, not gamble. Their job is to minimize risk, to keep your boat from rocking. This is a smart strategy for stability but if your dream is to make the disruptive, high-stakes move to put all of your savings into building your business, their advice becomes an obstacle.

The most brilliant advice is, at best, a map drawn for someone else’s terrain. It reflects the contours of their history, their strengths, and their specific challenges—not yours.

What works for one person can fail spectacularly for another.

To adopt it wholesale is to assume your journey is identical, an assumption that most likely leads to frustration. What was a compass for one life can easily become a counterproductive detour in another.

Our job is not to copy external wisdom. Our job is to hold the advice lightly, to test its edges against the unique, irreplaceable boundaries of our lives.

True wisdom is a practice. It’s the art of taking someone else’s truth and molding it until it can be applied in a useful way.

Stop borrowing maps. Start building your compass.

That is the work.

Thanks for reading! The journal prompt of today:

Which piece of guidance felt right for you, and why?

Please let me know in the comments.