The painful truth about good advice.

The best business advice I ever got made me want to punch something.

Hey, it’s been a while!

“Advice” has been on my mind lately. What is good advice, what is bad advice. You know good advice because when you hear it, it hurts.

The best business advice I ever got made me want to punch something.

Not because it was wrong. Because it was so fucking obvious I couldn’t believe I’d paid to hear it.

“Just launch it.” (and other such bangers as “talk to your customers” and “profit first”)

That’s it. That’s what a founder running a business eerily similar to mine — same market, same model, just 10x bigger — told me when I showed them my half-finished product roadmap.

Here’s what kills me: I already knew I should launch. You already know you should launch. We all know the obvious things we should be doing.

But when someone we admire says it, suddenly we listen.

I could tell you to launch right now. You’d nod and move on. But when someone who’s built the exact business you’re trying to build (and has 10 more years and £100m on you) tells you the same thing, you’ll cancel your meetings and ship by Friday.

The advice hasn’t changed. The source has.

This realisation led me to one of my favourite discoveries: permissionless mentorship. Most of my mentors have no idea they’re mentoring me. They’re just successful people sharing what worked, sometimes in person, sometimes in a blog post, sometimes in a random tweet at 2am.

I collect their advice like trading cards. Not because it’s revolutionary, but because of who it comes from.

But! Successful people give completely contradictory advice.

One mentor swears by growing at all costs. Raise money, hire fast, dominate the market. Another built a £50M+ business with seven people and tells me growth is a trap. One says diversify your revenue streams immediately. Another says focus on one thing for a decade.

They’re all right. They’re all wrong.

The difference isn’t the advice, it’s what game they’re playing. The venture-backed founder optimising for a billion-dollar exit will tell you to blitzscale. The lifestyle entrepreneur who works 20 hours a week will tell you to stay small and milk it.

Neither is lying. They’re just playing different games with different rules.

The dangerous part is when we take advice from someone playing a different game than us. You follow the “growth at all costs” playbook when what you really want is freedom. You stay small when what you really want is impact.

Most business advice comes with hidden motivations. The course creator telling you to build an audience needs you to believe that’s the path. The agency owner saying you need better systems sells system design. The investor preaching about growth needs another unicorn for their portfolio.

Again, they’re not wrong. But their truth might not be your truth.

The best insights come from people who don’t know they’re teaching you, because they’re not trying to sell you their version of success.

Find the people whose success you respect and whose life you’d actually want. That second part is crucial. Plenty of successful people are miserable. Plenty of millionaires are trapped by their own creations.

Study what they say, not because it’s new, but because they’ve earned the right to make the obvious feel urgent — and because they’re playing the same game you want to play.

Then do the obvious thing you’ve been avoiding.

You know what it is. The only question is whose voice you need to hear before you’ll actually do it.

Hope that was useful!

P.S. - Before you take anyone’s advice, ask yourself: What game are they playing? What are they optimising for? What are they selling? The best mentors are the ones who’ve built what you actually want, not just what looks impressive on LinkedIn