When someone gives you advice, what they are mostly doing is describing what worked for them. That means that every piece of advice carries an invisible set of conditions attached: the state of the field at the time, the particular people who happened to be around, the opportunities that existed then and do not now, and a quantity of luck that has been quietly edited out by a memory doing what memory does.

We construct causal stories that are systematically overweight the decisions we made and underweight the circumstances we were handed. The person who tells you to take the risky job at thirty is remembering the risk and the outcome, not the safety net that made the risk survivable. Multiply this by the fact that advice-givers are selected for having succeeded, and you have a body of guidance that is sincere, confidently delivered, and systematically distorted by the survival of the people giving it.

What follows is not that advice is worthless, which would be a silly conclusion. It is that advice should be treated as evidence from a single case rather than as instruction. The question to ask is not whether it worked but what made it work: which conditions were doing the real labour, and whether you are standing in anything resembling them. That converts an anecdote into something you can actually reason about. I am aware, writing a daily reflection, that this applies with full force to everything in this series. So, as a reflection for today: whose advice are you currently following? And would it still hold if the conditions that produced it were gone?