When Good Advice Is a Trojan Horse

Defend Your Creative Life from Unnecessary Obligations

We live our lives surrounded by a chorus of shoulds.

They accumulate gradually, as we try to improve. We read the best practices, success stories and guides. We listen to industry experts and accept friendly tips-and most of them come loaded with new things we should be doing.

For example, if you’re trying to be a writer, you’ll find plenty of advice about what other authors have done, how to write, how to publish, how to be successful.

If you want to be a writer, you should…

Here’s how I wrote my book or experienced success, you should do the same.

Alas, these promises are like Trojan horses. You dutifully drag them into the walls of your life and take them on. But wrapped inside each nugget of advice is a small army of assumptions, obligations, and practices that can quickly take over your life.

One action leads to another, to another. Pretty soon you are spending most of your time on tasks dictated by other people’s objectives or experiences rather than your own values. Your life fills with things that you don’t really want to be doing.

I have wandered down many false trails following sign-posts marked “Should.”