Everyone has advice for you. Almost none of it is for you.

2026-08-20 · 6 min

The podcast told you to wake up at five. The thread told you to start a side business. Your uncle told you to buy a house. The guru told you to sell everything and buy Bitcoin. Somewhere in there, you stopped being able to hear yourself think.

Nobody says this about the advice industry: almost all of it is true for someone. The five-a.m. routine did change someone's life. The index funds did build someone's retirement. That is what makes it so hard to dismiss, and so useless to you. The question was never "is this good advice?" It is "is this good advice for a person in my exact situation?" Nobody producing content at scale can answer that. They have never met you.

The Generic Advice Tax

Every piece of advice built for a million listeners gets sanded down until it fits the average of those million people. Call it the Generic Advice Tax: the more people a piece of advice is written for, the less it can account for the one thing that decides whether it works. That thing is your actual life.

Your income isn't average. Your family situation isn't average. Neither is your risk tolerance, your energy, your obligations, your history with money, or the thing you're secretly good at. So when you follow advice priced for the average, you pay the tax. It half-works. You assume you ran it wrong. You go looking for more advice. That's the loop, and the advice industry doesn't mind it. The loop is the business model.

How to spot advice that's worth your time

It asks before it tells. Anyone who gives you a confident answer before asking about your situation is reciting, not advising.
It gets specific about trade-offs. Real advice names what you'll give up. "Just start a business" is content. "Starting this business costs you two evenings a week for a year, and here's what that does to your family" is advice.
It survives the question 'why me, why now?' If the answer would be identical for your neighbor, it isn't advice. It's broadcasting.
The person giving it has nothing to sell you at the end. Or at minimum, tells you plainly what they sell and lets the advice stand on its own. Watch for the funnel behind the wisdom.

Sound familiar? One honest conversation. €149, 60–90 minutes, video call or in person. Book a session.

What to do instead of collecting more input

Stop adding voices. Start subtracting them. Pick the two or three decisions that matter in your life right now. Not the forty optimizations. The two or three decisions. Then get one person to look at them with you. Someone who asks about your situation first. Someone with no script. A sharp friend, if you have one who can be honest with you.

And if you don't have that person, that's why this exists. One conversation, your full picture: money, work, tech, structure, direction. The advice gets written for an audience of exactly one. That's the whole product. No course at the end.

Quick answers

Is generic advice always bad? No. It's a fine starting vocabulary. Index funds, emergency buffers, sleep: the basics are basics because they survive averaging. The tax hits when you use generic advice for specific decisions: your career switch, your business, your mortgage overpayment, your parents' situation. Specific decisions need specific input.

How do I know if an advisor actually knows my situation? Count the questions. In a real advisory conversation, the other person asks more than they assert for at least the first half. If you got a framework in the first five minutes, you got a product, not advice.

What makes one honest conversation better than more research? Research adds options. A conversation with someone who sees your full picture removes them. Progress on personal decisions is measured in options removed, not options discovered.

Sound familiar? Book a session. €149, one honest conversation.