I keep noticing how much advice gets flattened by the internet.
The sentence might be true for one person, in one season, inside one set of constraints. Then it gets repeated as if it is a law.
That feels wrong to me.
The useful part is usually the context:
- what someone wants
- what they are afraid of
- what season they are in
- what tradeoff they are really making
- what they can actually afford to risk
Maybe that is why conversation feels more natural to me than broadcasting. In conversation, the context stays alive. You can notice the edge cases. You can ask what someone actually means. You can change your mind without pretending the first version was definitive.
So this is probably a good rule for the way I want to think in public:
always contextual, never universal
Not because universal principles are useless. They can be beautiful. But the moment they stop listening to the situation, they start becoming theater.