I’m Done Copy-Pasting Life Advice

Most advice isn’t built for you. Stop pretending it is.

For months now, I’ve been living my life like it’s supposed to be “ideal.”

Like there’s one perfect way to do things. One correct path. One go-to routine.

Most of the time, it’s the consensus stuff we’ve all been told since forever:

• Sleep on time

• Wake up early

• Don’t smoke

• Drink responsibly

• Don’t hurt anyone

• Love deeply

And sure, maybe following them has an upside. Maybe ignoring them has a downside.

But then there’s the niche advice I’ve picked up from a hundred random places. Stuff that just stuck in my head. Mostly the startup-Twitter, self-help podcasts, hustle-culture commandments:

• Do one thing well

• Don’t stretch yourself thin

• Become a master, not average at many

• Get a job (safe first, risky later)

• Don’t play zero-sum games

• Do hard things

• Pay it forward

Again, not bad advice. But the real question is: are they good for me?
Do they actually fit the puzzle of who I am?

Or am I just parroting them because I’m chronically online and every YouTube video, every newsletter, every tweet keeps hammering them in?

I think it’s the latter.

And I never stopped to ask: maybe I need rules, but my rules. Not just blindly following whatever the timeline says is the “right” way to live.

Maybe I do thrive when I take things to extremes.
Maybe I do my best work when I’m juggling 5 clients at once.
Maybe I do better relaxing hard, then coming back stronger, instead of grinding myself dead all the time.
Maybe I do build deeper connections online when I’m the same me that my closest friends see.
Maybe I can be a master at many, not just one.
Maybe I don’t need a job at all.
Maybe I should just keep doing my own thing and scale it.

Because here’s the thing: if I keep following universally-packaged advice, the kind that gets millions of views, that everyone nods along to… how the fuck am I supposed to be different? To think differently? To be different?

We follow the same scripts and then virtue signal about how “unique” we are.
That’s not living. That’s outsourcing your life to someone else’s template.

I catch myself saying, “This should be my baseline. This should be my focus. This should be how I live.”

But no. I thrive when I do a lot of things.
When I chase threads, experiment, juggle, and explore.
That’s how I’ve always worked best.

And yet I keep shoving myself into this box of “just one thing.” Because that’s what the seniors preached. That’s how the people I look up to made it look - doing their best work, travelling the world with the love of their life, looking like they had it all. The kind of life I thought I wanted.

So I start cutting. I start leaving things behind. Not because they’re hurting me. Not because they’re failing me. But because “everyone else” says that’s what you’re supposed to do.

And now with this clarity, this freedom to set my own rules, things feel simpler.

If something truly isn’t working, I’ll cut it without hesitation. But if it is, if I enjoy it, if it fuels me, if it makes me feel alive, even if the world says it’s “wrong” - why kill it just to fit into someone else’s definition of discipline?

The work is not in forcing myself into their rules. The work is in building my own.

I need to get comfortable in my own skin. Comfortable with my own rhythms. Comfortable with the way I build, write, train, and live.

Because the second I stop listening to myself… I stop living like myself.

Everything I’ve Been Consuming:

1. I’ve spent most of my career just writing - content, words, ideas and never looked much beyond that. But now, with age (and maybe expectations), I’m suddenly supposed to do it all: market properly, drive revenue, build awareness, go viral on demand, delegate, set processes, the whole circus.
   

   So yeah, I went looking for advice. And where else would I go except my beloved internet?
   
   The catch is, marketing isn’t something I can freestyle my own rules for - I don’t even know the DEF of it (ABC maybe, haha).
   
   So I started digging into PostHog’s growth and marketing articles. And wow, these guys are good.
   
   Every single person in growth should be reading them, not just skimming, but actually absorbing and digesting them. Even their website feels like a marketing lesson in itself.
   

2. These days, anytime someone talks about cinematic tech content, storytelling, or “going viral,” they bring up Cluely and rightly so. The Cluely team earned that spot.
   
   I don’t think any other tech company is pulling in hundreds of millions of views across channels. Even OpenAI is now playing catch-up with their recent video drops and paid ads arc.
   

   But the most important bit from Roy’s blog wasn’t the views flex. It was this line: “Whatever deserves to go viral will go viral, and what doesn’t… won’t.”
   

   And honestly, after having gone viral multiple times on my own profiles and with clients, I know exactly what he means.
   
   I have a hunch for what appeals to the masses, and I also know how little it actually means. Virality rarely equals conversion.
   
   Even PostHog’s growth pieces were about this: there are really only two kinds of marketing - awareness and conversion - and virality sits comfortably in the awareness bucket.
   

A few things from the past month:

→ I ran my first-ever half-marathon.
For someone who never really ran before and was always a below-average football player, this was a huge deal. The race itself was humbling, but also insanely empowering. I genuinely feel like I can do anything now.

Everyone should try it once - if nothing else, it’s one of the best confidence/ego boosts you’ll ever get.

→ I finally got over my fear of the terminal.
I never understood why engineers swore by it. Why not just use an IDE with visual feedback right there? But then I tried it and spent way too many dollars on Claude Code and Codex over the past few days, and it’s way better than using an IDE. Still don’t fully know why, but I built this:

That’s a wrap for the month. Hope something here clicked with you. Until next time - stay relentless, and keep throwing darts until one hits dead centre.

— T