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

2026-08-20 · 6 min

Somewhere between the podcast that told you to wake up at five, the thread that told you to start a side business, the uncle who told you to buy a house, and the guru who told you to sell everything and buy Bitcoin — you stopped being able to hear yourself think.

Here's the thing nobody says about the advice industry: almost all of it is true for someone. The five-a.m. routine genuinely changed someone's life. The index funds genuinely built someone's retirement. That's what makes it so hard to dismiss — and so useless to you. The question was never "is this good advice?" The question is "is this good advice for a person in my exact situation?" And nobody producing content at scale can answer that, because they've 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 variable that decides whether it works — your actual life.

Your income isn't average. Your family situation isn't average. Your risk tolerance, your energy, your obligations, your history with money, the thing you're secretly good at — none of it is average. So when you follow advice priced for the average, you pay the tax: it half-works, you assume you executed it wrong, and you go looking for more advice. That's the loop. The advice industry doesn't mind the loop. 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 actually matter in your life right now — not the forty optimizations, the two or three decisions — and get one person to look at those decisions 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 literally why this exists. One conversation, your full picture — money, work, tech, structure, direction — and 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 eliminates them. Progress on personal decisions is measured in options removed, not options discovered.

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