Quick Takes: Advice I'd Un-Give If I Could

I’ve given a lot of advice over the years, and some of it was wrong. Not “wrong in hindsight based on new information”—just wrong. The kind of wrong that made sense at the time because I hadn’t lived long enough to know better.

The first one stings: I told people to find their passion. This was years ago, before I realized most people don’t have singular passions waiting like buried treasure. I made good people feel broken because they couldn’t point to the one thing. The real advice should’ve been: your values matter more than passion, and you build meaning through work. That understanding came too late.

Then the consistency gospel. I preached showing up every day like it was a moral virtue—Get up at 5 AM, write every morning, ship every week. The subtext: if you’re not doing it consistently, you’re not serious. What I missed was that rhythm matters, but so does rest. Sometimes the most important thing you do is stop doing the wrong thing entirely. I was selling discipline to people who needed permission to quit.

I also overstated how much ambition people need. For years I talked about growth and scaling like bigger was always better. More revenue, more reach. I didn’t account for people already drowning in enough. “How can I do more?” isn’t always the right question. Sometimes it’s “What can I let go of?”

The hardest admission: I told people to charge more without acknowledging the market doesn’t always see value the way you do. I’ve watched freelancers follow that advice into isolation, pricing themselves out of work. Sometimes the gap isn’t about confidence. It’s real. And blaming someone for not charging enough is another way of blaming them for the economy they’re in.

These aren’t retractions—they’re revisions. I still believe in showing up, building value, and knowing your worth. But I was oversimplifying the human part of it. The part that says: some days you’re not broken, your environment is. Some seasons require less, not more. And some advice that works for one person is a cage for another.

If you’ve taken my advice and it didn’t land the way I said it would, the problem might not be you.

If you’re working through a different kind of wrong—what to do after a mistake—that’s a skill that actually matters. And if you feel like you’re starting from scratch for the third time, maybe the issue isn’t starting over. It’s knowing why you do.