Beware Where You Get Advice.

Here is the Preface to a book I've been writing for 25 years and am not done with yet. It's 2,800 words long. So it may take a minute in case you're interested. I'd love to know what you think

There are four kinds of people in the world who make it their business to offer advice about life to the rest of us: fakes, flakes, friends, and philosophers. While the people in the last two categories – friends and philosophers – can be helpful, and sometimes very helpful indeed, those in the first two groups – the fakes and the flakes – can be harmful, and even disastrously dangerous. One purpose of this book is to indicate how to recognize the difference between the helpful and harmful guides to life that are available to us all.

Fakes are of course people who pretend to be what they’re not, and to know what they don’t. The reason that they so often offer the rest of us advice about life is very simple. Advice sells. The aim of the fakes is simply money, fame, status, or power, and they’ll do whatever it takes to get these things. They’re basically just deceptive manipulators interested only in their own gain. The advice that they give us – or, rather, sell us – is meant only to line their own pockets and pad their bank accounts. And so they tell us primarily what they think we want to hear.

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By smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the minds of the na?ve.

Romans 16:18

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The problem is that sufficiently cagey phonies can be impressively polished and slick, masters of appearance, impresarios of illusion. And because of this, they can be very successful in weaving a spell of counterfeit wisdom and care.

Flakes are a bit different. They tend to live in a world of their own, unhinged in various ways from the realm of existence known by the rest of us as reality. They make wild and extravagant claims about life, and provide advice for the rest of us based on those claims but, unlike the fakes, they actually tend to believe all or at least most of what they say. They’re so completely convinced, they can often be convincing. The problem is that they’re so unplugged from the actual world of fact and value as to be every bit as dangerous as the fakes, if not more so. They’ve deeply imbibed the outrageousness they’re hawking to the rest of us. They’re sincere. They’re passionate. And they’re nuts.

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And fools cannot hold their tongues.

Chaucer

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Of course, these two categories of fakes and flakes aren’t mutually exclusive by any means. There are plenty of flakes in the world whose heads are full of wacky, ungrounded, and superstitious beliefs, and who still also make intentionally deceptive claims going far beyond what they actually believe, in pursuit of the money, or adoration, they think they can gain as a result. And it may be hard to find a major flim-flam artist in the world of high priced advice who isn’t to some extent as deluded as he is deceptive. But we can still draw a useful distinction between fakes and flakes based on the most fundamental tendency they embody.

By contrast, over on the positive side of the ledger, I want to define the friends who offer us advice in a broad and inclusive way. Our close personal friends often give us counsel about particular situations, events, and opportunities in our lives, but never for a price. They’re genuinely interested in our good fortune, and want to be helpful, sharing whatever they’ve seen, heard, or learned that might be useful to us. They may warn us about some paths and recommend others. They’re not always right, of course, but they’re generally concerned for our welfare, and their words of counsel can quite often be very beneficial – if they’re both wise and well-intentioned. True friends want us to prosper and do well not because of what they’ll get out of it, but simply because of what we’ll get out of it. That’s just part of what it means for them to be our friends.

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My best friend is the man who, in wishing me well, wishes it for my sake.

Aristotle

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Because of the salient features of friendship that are operative here, I want to stretch this category beyond the relatively small array of people we know well. I’ve found it helpful to think of many of the better motivational writers and speakers who give and sell advice about life as sincerely serving the role of a friend-to-all, in at least this regard. They do indeed care about other people and actually want to be helpful. They are typically paid for their books and talks – and sometimes a lot – but many of them are also people who often do free presentations as well, and frequently offer words of advice and encouragement to people who have sought their counsel, in emails and letters, as well as communicating heartfelt recommendations in other ways, when the only reward they receive is a feeling that they’ve done something helpful.

These friendly advisors may occupy any point along a broad spectrum of sagacity and old-fashioned common sense, but they are never mendacious hypocrites or mentally unbalanced pseudo-oracles. They’re often the most effective cheerleaders of modern life. They’re not always especially careful writers, or speakers of great substance and precision, but they talk and write about success in life as first and foremost an act of genuine friendship to the rest of us. When they engage in hyperbole or exaggeration, it’s usually a result of their own enthusiasm, it’s well intended, and it’s rarely self-conscious.

These friends of their fellow men and women could have any of a wide variety of backgrounds – in sales, military service, athletic coaching, sports stardom, or business building – and they want to share with the rest of us what they’ve learned in the course of their life achievement, as well as in their own reading and study along the way. A great deal of the motivational, inspirational, and more insightful self-help literature in the past and even nowadays comes from the work of good sincere friends like these. Some of them may rise to the level of our fourth and last category, but it’s a much smaller group, with distinct qualifications, that we now need to consider.

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Clearness marks the sincerity of philosophers.

Vauvenargues

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For the category of philosophers, I have in mind the entire history of the writers and thinkers who have lived in many different cultures over at least the past twenty-five hundred years, and have in various ways conveyed their clear guidance and life advice to others in their own time, as well as to those of us who would follow them in subsequent ages. I’m not referring primarily to professors of philosophy in colleges or universities, or to people who have Ph.D. degrees in the currently recognized academic discipline of philosophy – otherwise, I’d be excluding many paradigmatic sages like Socrates, Lao Tsu, Cicero and Confucius, not to mention those in our own day who operate outside the institutional structures of higher education, and yet serve the same role for people around them as the great practical philosophers of the past. In my understanding here, a genuine philosopher speaks out of a mindset of broad knowledge, careful analysis, deep synthesis, and targeted precision. He or she is intent on capturing and sharing with others a wide range of useful and profound truth about life, and practical advice based on that truth that can help anyone flourish in their various personal adventures in the world.

The advice of a true philosopher can help any of us to organize our own thoughts and experiences, and perhaps to see familiar situations in unfamiliar and creative ways. A practical philosopher can inspire us, comfort us, ennoble us, and help show us the way forward with genuine insight and wisdom. As the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca once put it, “Philosophy is good advice.” And it’s good precisely when and because it’s exact, clear, true, deep, and universal, as well as practical.

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At best, the true philosopher can fulfill his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.

George Santayana

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Again, as in the first two categories of fakes and flakes, these positive categories of friends and philosophers are not at all mutually exclusive. Many philosophers have been generally friends of humanity. Only a few have been misanthropes. And you may even have a personal friend who is a real philosopher. Of course, I’m not talking about any acquaintance who is an egregious BS artist, a hot air windbag, or pretentious, pedantic, irritating know-it-all, but a good buddy or close girlfriend who is a real “lover of wisdom” with a sharp eye, a trained mind, and a good heart who, while seeking to understand life better, endeavors to help others get their bearings as well, just because it’s good. And in such a case, you can benefit from not only that person’s general concern for other human beings – and the sort of advice or guidance he or she would give anyone – but also from the specific care and direction that can arise out of a more particular and intimate knowledge of you.

To some limited extent, of course, we’re almost all in a very broad sense philosophers – good or bad, careful or sloppy – and so also, therefore, are our friends. We’re all seeking in our own ways to understand more of life, gleaning insight from our experiences, and searching for what is most worth valuing, and worth the investment of our time. But for our purposes here, I’d like to reserve the distinctive category of philosopher for those fairly rare individuals who have made more than normal progress in these intellectual activities and existential investigations and can report on what they’ve learned in particularly succinct, insightful, and powerful ways. So, although it’s certainly possible to have a genuine philosopher as a good friend, this is not as common as we might like, since real, full-fledged philosophers aren’t as commonly found among us as they could and perhaps should be. The question I want to ask is, then: Where are the best philosophers we can listen to with profit?

The Problem We Face

The problem we face right now is that there are so many people eager to sell the rest of us “the secret” to life, happiness, and success that I sometimes wonder how, at this point, there could possibly still be any real secrets left concerning these things. And what about all these purported purveyors of profundity themselves, the people offering us their words of wisdom in book, seminar, and video form – who exactly are they? What’s their basis for giving us advice? I think I need to see some I.D. – don’t you?

I was at a big conference years ago, and after I met the organizer, he started telling me about one of their speakers the previous year. He said, “The guy was a well known memory expert. That’s what his P.R. claimed, and that’s why he was speaking for us. He was going to teach us how to remember names and faces. I introduced myself to him the first day when he arrived, and we talked for a few minutes, since I was running the show and wanted to greet him and make him feel comfortable. Two days later, he came up and introduced himself to me as if we had never met. And he wasn’t joking. Can you believe it?” I was surprised. And it was, at the time, hard to believe.

Not too long after that, I heard some basically similar stories. I had just arrived at a beautiful meeting facility outside Princeton, New Jersey. Before I was scheduled to speak to a group of luxury car dealers from around the country, along with some top-level auto executives who were sponsoring the event, I had a very nice lunch with several of the participants. After about fifteen minutes of fun and lively conversation all around, I asked the guys at the table, “Who have you had speak to you so far this week?” There was a group groan in response to my question that seemed to come from everyone. One man across the table put down his fork and studied me for a second.

“Well, if you really want to know, the first guy was a real character. He showed up like a celebrity, with this blonde on his arm that you wouldn’t believe. It was a red-carpet-at-the-Oscars kind of thing. I thought to myself, ‘Who is this guy?’ Turns out, he was a time management expert. It took him four hours to tell us what he could have said in twenty minutes. I’m not kidding.”

Another well-dressed gentleman at the table spoke up. “Yeah, and the next guy on deck was supposed to be a world-class organizational guru. But the only organization he had ever run was a Boy Scout troop. And he was here to tell us how to do things right at Mercedes Benz.” The guy then laughed.

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Those who wish to seem learned to fools, seem fools to the learned.

Quintilian (AD 95)

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I couldn’t help but think of the highly paid relationship experts I had met over the years, all of whom – I had been repeatedly stunned to learn – had experienced a significant amount of trouble in their lives, with relationships. I was starting to wonder about the old adage concerning those who teach and those who do. As a teacher myself, it was a bit disheartening to hear how many self-proclaimed experts selling advice to the world don’t really seem to know what they’re talking about. Or maybe they just don’t apply what they’ve learned in their own lives – unless of course they’ve tried, and it clearly doesn’t work for them, so why should we think it will work for us? And yet, many of these experts have become very wealthy from their talks and books and DVDs of advice for the rest of us.

Let’s face it. We live in a time when advice is big business. Because of this, despite the bizarre pervasiveness of the general phenomenon we can call “The Barefoot Shoemaker,” I’ve noticed that it’s at least a little difficult to come across a financial guru who is actually poor, but I have to wonder whether this proves anything at all about their content-relevant talents. With the right image and PR spin, it seems, almost anyone sufficiently photogenic and well spoken can become decidedly rich from the modern guru role alone. I’ve certainly known of speakers and writers on success who didn’t seem to have any at all until they began speaking and writing on it. So it does make you wonder.

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I’ve sat in an office and listened to some mystic stalk up and down for hours spouting tripe that’d land him on a nut-farm anywhere outside of California – and then in the end tell me how practical he was, and I was a dreamer – and would I kindly go away and make sense out of what he’d said.

Wylie White, Hollywood writer,

in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon

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As I started to notice this odd phenomenon throughout our culture, it began to occur to me that we’d all better start to be a little more careful about the people we go to for advice about the things that matter most. We all want to be happy. And that’s usually why we want to be successful, in good relationships, and financially secure. It’s why we want to use our time well, and flourish in our work. Our quest is a full and robust form of happiness for ourselves and for those we care about the most. And many of us would like to make a positive impact in the world as well. Some version of that could even be a part of experiencing real happiness. In response to our interests and concerns, our hopes and our dreams, there are all these advisors out there in the world who offer us their expert guidance for a fee. Of course, there’s nothing at all wrong with a fee – as long as there is nothing wrong with the advice, either.

This book is about where not to go, and where perhaps to look instead, for the deepest insights about happiness, success, meaning, and everything else that matters to us most. We don’t necessarily have to run to the local bookstore’s “New Arrivals” shelf, or to their “Bestsellers” section for the latest revelation of secrets from the people most touted in the media today in order to discover what we truly need to know. What then should we do? I invite you to read on to learn the answer.