On the severity of good advice

If GNCC works, why is Dr. Richard still trekking?

Today is October 26. I do not remember any October 26. But nonetheless, I will write and you will read, because we are free men. Free men make their own choices.

You will also share this and tell your friends to subscribe to my Substack, afterall, you have free will.

King Solomon’s Court.

Dr Richard’s uncle was a wise man. According to the GNCC C.E.O, Dr. Richard— the man who has made his first million, a million times. From my calculations, he should be worth over a hundred million naira now and yet, this paragon wey dey para gan still treks. Knowing Dr. Richard, he will tell you the man who walked a thousand miles did not use a car, he took a step—with his leg. He will also convince you that a man who cannot trek, cannot walk his talk. A man who treks is a man of integrity.

And of course, pinchers like you and I will be chastened out of our 5k to get 1 million. “Uhmm. Word,” you have now gifted Mr. Richard his breakfast money. All hail GNCC.

I have observed that this world, being quite mad of course, has developed a peculiar habit of giving very good advice about everything.

You know, this would be an excellent arrangement if it were not for one small difficulty: the advices are too good to be true, and too true to be good. The whole difficulty can be stated by saying that while the older generations collected proverbs, we collect professional advice-givers, like Mr. Richard, which is a very different thing indeed.

Let me quickly tell you about an interesting woman. We are going to call this very interesting woman - Cassandra, though she was far more unfortunate than that ancient prophetess. For while the original Cassandra was cursed with giving true prophecies that no one would believe, our own Cassandra was cursed with believing false prophecies that everyone thought true. Cassandra lived her life by a book of collected wisdom. She kept it bound in leather, its pages yellow with devotion, corners worn from desperate consultation. She treated it like the ancient Greeks treated the Oracle of Delphi—with reverence and fear, never daring to question its prophecies.

The book was filled with good advice, the kind you will find in a GNCC course, you see, and that—that is the curious thing about modern advice. It is usually perfectly right and therefore all perfectly wrong. "Save 20% of your income." "Never go to bed angry." "Follow your passion," declares the motivational speaker, which would have been splendid counsel for Shakespeare but rather troubling for Pontius Pilate, who was presumably passionate about crucifixion. With Cassandra, each maxim gleamed like polished bronze, promising salvation through adherence. Each page whispered secrets of success, murmuring promises of a life well-lived. Cassandra walked so Layi Wasabi could crawl.

That very wealthy man with a bag full of books and a head full of wisdom has once mentioned that you have to learn to be the best of the best. I suppose that is good advice but who is going to teach you that?

Has this man casually told us to be Newton? But one cannot simply be an Isaac Newton, not from a book at least. One cannot simple make the greatest discoveries by reading profound quotes.

Isaac Newton.

It is worth noting that none of the great heroes of history ever followed good advice. Joan of Arc did not consult a career counselor about the propriety of leading armies in male attire. St. Francis did not attend a financial planning seminar before deciding to live in holy poverty. Newton definitely didn't become who he is today by becoming a farmer.

But Cassandra followed every word religiously. She saved diligently, invested wisely, networked broadly, exercised daily. She did everything right, everything the book commanded. She became a perfect assemblage of good advice—a collection of wise sayings wearing human skin. Before ChatGpt, there was Cassandra.

One day, love came knocking at her door. It came in the form of a wandering artist who had no savings, who stayed up all night in creative fury, who believed passion was not something to be followed but something that follows you. He was everything the book warned against. "Artists are unstable," the book had said. "Creative types lack security," it had cautioned. And so, faithful to her scripture of success, Cassandra closed the door.

Years later, as she sat in her perfectly optimized life, surrounded by the fruits of good advice, she wondered why happiness felt like a foreign language she couldn't quite grasp. Her financial portfolio was impressive, but her story was boring. Her network was vast, but her heart was a desert. She had followed all the right paths and arrived exactly nowhere. This is how we consume wisdom and tweets the way we consume Chicken rep’s refuel meal. Downloading productivity apps and self-help books, subscribing to motivation gurus and life coaches. We are drowning in a sea of good advice, gasping for the air of authentic experience.

A curious thing about good advice is that it always seems to come from people who have done exactly the opposite of what they recommend. The man who tells you to wake at dawn probably made his fortune by staying up all night. The woman who insists on careful planning probably stumbled into success by glorious accident. No one gives you the main cake. It is rather like taking swimming lessons from someone who has only ever watched the sea from a safe distance.

Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived - Soren Kierkegaard

..and mysteries, by their nature, tend to ignore good advice.

And perhaps you wish to defend yourself, to prove that you are not under this tyranny. But tell me, how many times have you ignored your intuition because it conflicted with "good advice?” How often have you forced yourself into the mold of what "successful people do," only to feel like a stranger in your own life? How many times have you developed compulsive habits to spark joy? Isn't that what the cool people do?

And maybe, just maybe the greatest tragedy of our age is not that we give too much advice, but that we have forgotten how to give bad advice. By bad advice, I mean the sort of magnificently impractical counsel that sends young men on quests for Holy Grails and young women into enchanted forests. The kind of advice that any sensible person would reject immediately, and which has therefore been the cause of all great adventures and discoveries.

The modern world is dying not from a lack of good advice but from a surplus of it. We have become so afraid of making mistakes that we have forgotten how to make discoveries, we now listen to strangers on the Internet. We have become so obsessed with best practices that we have forgotten how to practice being our best selves.

What we need is not more good advice but more bad advice – or rather, we need to remember that the best advice often looks very much like madness to the sensible world. We need more people telling us to tilt at windmills and fewer telling us to diversify our investment portfolios. We need more calls to impossible virtue and fewer calls to practical success.

For in the end, the really good advice, the kind that actually saves souls and changes lives, has always been rather bad advice from a practical standpoint. "Take up your cross and follow Me" is, after all, terrible career advice. "Consider the lilies" would get you laughed out of any financial planning office. And "love your enemies" remains the worst foreign policy suggestion in history.

But perhaps I am giving advice about not taking advice, which is itself a form of advice and therefore suspicious. So let me end with something that is not advice at all, but merely an observation: the people who changed the world were precisely those who didn't follow the good advice of their times. And that is not advice – it is merely a warning.

Or perhaps it is a promise.