How to Spot Terrible Advice from Bad Gurus

Start by looking for 4 key blind spots.

Among all the bad advice out there, one article stands out in my memory. It was an article in The Chronicle telling grad students how to be more responsible with their money. There was one problem: the authors (a married couple) enjoyed an income above $50,000. At the time, I barely made $12,000 — right at the poverty cutoff.

They gave advice like rent an apartment instead of buying a home. Drive a used car instead of a new one. Don’t eat out as much.

Bad advice usually comes from the ones who love telling everyone what to do, and using the lifestyles of the rich and famous as blueprints for how to pursue our wildest fantasies.

In reality, it’s harder than ever to get ahead:

That doesn’t mean we should just give up. But maybe we should raise a little more of an eyebrow when some guru comes along promising to make us richer and kinder and more mindful, pointing to the likes of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs as paragons of human happiness. The worst advice in this genre does nothing but maintain the status quo, and pile all the blame for our failures on us, rather than systemic inequality.

Maybe it’s smarter to take this advice with a little skepticism, especially when it comes from someone who never had to deal with your problems. How can you tell? Four simple things.

The average morning routine blog seems to assume that children either don’t exist, or wake up when you tell them to. Sorry, my kid wakes up at 5 am most mornings lately. So I can’t really start my day with yoga. (Not that I ever did, or wanted to.) This doesn’t make me a failure. And it doesn’t make you one, either. We’re going to be fine.

Most productivity porn out there never mentions how you can get more done with kids in your life. They talk about things like removing…

Related posts:

Traffic accidents killed over 34,000 and injured more than 1.8 million individuals in 2017 alone (NHTSA, 2017). These casualties have financial repercussions into the billions ($44 billion; CDC…

The TraceTogether Token is a hardware device designed specifically for contact tracing purposes in our fight against COVID-19. It acts as the physical counterpart to the TraceTogether app and forms…

Are you an entrepreneur who began your personal business the previous couple of years? Then you’re a part of a large group of tens of millions of small business homeowners in the US. Document numbers…