When advice is dangerous

I’m not an expert.

I’ve long held the opinion that while we live in an amazing era of opportunity afforded by technology, said opportunity is giving too many people free reign to drown the rest of us in bad advice.

Too much “how to” in the crockpot of online influence for my own taste.

And I think it’s stifling (see also killing) our collective creativity.

It’s disheartening to see more and more people I consider true creative misfits and among the few original voices on the Web relinquishing their individuality for a piece of that influence pie.

Don’t get me wrong, I get the need to provide for our families and sustain our ability to do good work.

But with so few of us courageous enough to go deeper, to seek quality in a vacuum of perpetual quantity, to seek originality and distinction in the neon blinking lights of success formulas —who’s going to be left to shake shit up when we need them to?

I’m convinced it’s because we’re terrified of our own shadows.

Terrified that we’ll get stuck in whatever is fueling us to seek faster, better, more.

Terrified that we’ll miss out on leap frogging to success in the short term.

Terrified enough to be impatient with the process and seek shortcuts instead.

The problem that so few experts are willing to address or admit to its existence?

What happens when this bubble of abstract bursts?

What happens when all of the information empires teaching information empire building tactics crumble at the feet of disinterest and boredom?

What happens when people get tired of consuming the same, regurgitated content from the same fire hose and decide they want something more pure, more real, more human?

I’ve listened to a lot of good advice. But the line between listening and obsession is very, very thin.

It’s easy to leech tactics/best practices/processes/systems/habits from our favorite experts and expect them to apply the same to our own lives.

But it’s rarely transferrable in a true one-to-one fashion.

The danger is two fold:

One — we lose the already tenuous connection to our own intuition in the light of everyone else’s. When the tactics or formulas fail, and we fail to lean on a foundation of trust in ourselves, we have nothing to fall back on. So we return to the feeding trough.

Two — we bury all of the great stories, the great art, the unforgettable, the important questions and the curiosity that comes with imagination and the journey of discovery under a landfill of mediocre.

And for what?

More blogs about living intentionally? More courses about the steps to an ideal existence? More guides and manifestos that teach you to be brave in concept instead of in real time?

Someone will inevitably respond to this and say, “great artists steal, no ideas are truly original, great art doesn’t matter if no one witnesses it, etc.”

But then I just remind myself that opinions and advice run the same gamut.

At the end of the day, I’d rather risk greater failure for the joy of going my own way and creating something I’m deeply connected to — something that might just help people connect to that disappearing-reappearing side of humanity we’re so easily disconnected from.

And I can’t possibly stay that course if I’m neck deep in trying to copycat everyone else’s roadmap to success.