The best advice I've ever received

I was in my mid-twenties, back in Stockholm after a few years studying at university in the United States, and I needed to figure out what to do with my life. Almost everyone around me suggested the same path. Find something stable. Get a nice salary, secure five weeks of guaranteed holiday, and settle into a predictable routine. Instead, I took a sales job at a local PR agency. The catch was that it paid absolutely nothing unless I actually sold something. It was completely commission only. My friends thought I was an idiot. My family was quietly concerned. But I took the role because of a passing comment from a guy working there named Fredrik Bage. He had watched me interact with people, pulled me aside, and told me I would be good at sales. That was it. He didn't offer a grand philosophy. He just gave me permission to try something I secretly wanted to do. We eventually co-founded Mediapilot together and spent roughly seven years building it, creating over a hundred jobs in the process. I owe a massive debt to that one quiet remark.

I find it interesting how we process guidance from other people. Good advice rarely sounds like a quote from a book. It usually sounds like a casual observation you cannot shake. Over the years, I have noticed that the words that actually change my behaviour are usually simple, highly specific, and often delivered by someone who has nothing to gain from my decision. I want to share a few more of those pieces of advice that stuck with me, along with one very famous piece of wisdom that I think is entirely wrong.

Write it down and score it

Around 2010, I started taking advice from a mentor about treating my personal life with the same rigour I applied to my businesses. In a company, you track metrics, you look at spreadsheets, and you have quarterly reviews to see if you are heading in the right direction. Life usually gets whatever energy is left over at the end of the day. I decided to change that and started keeping a written life plan. Every single year, I sit down and rate five areas out of ten: family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. It sounds incredibly clinical, perhaps a bit ridiculous to some, but it forces absolute honesty. If I give my health a four because my knees hurt and I am eating terribly, I have to look at that number on the page. You cannot hide from a four. It stops me from drifting. I have used this system for over a decade, and it remains the best mechanism I have for noticing when I am neglecting the people I love or burning myself out.

Good advice rarely sounds like a quote from a book. It usually sounds like a casual observation you cannot shake.

Leave the room

In my early thirties, I was told by an older entrepreneur to disappear for a while. He did not mean a weekend break in London, but a proper exit from my normal reality. I ended up travelling around the world for a stretch, largely disconnected from email and daily obligations. When you step out of your routine for months and put yourself in entirely unfamiliar streets, you realise how little you actually matter to the daily operation of the world. It is a humbling and incredibly freeing experience. We moved our family from Sweden to Marbella in Spain in 2018. The plan was to stay for two years. We are still here. I think that willingness to uproot, to change the scenery entirely and see what happens, comes directly from that early push to leave the room. You do not have to stay where you were planted.

The worst advice of all

Then there is the advice you hear everywhere, which I strongly suggest you ignore. Follow your passion. Let me explain why this is a terrible idea. If I followed my passion, I would be a professional tennis player. I play very often, but I am objectively awful at it. Truly bad. Nobody in their right mind wants to pay me to hit a ball repeatedly into the net. The better advice is to find out what you are useful at, do that until you become highly competent, and use the freedom that buys you to fund your actual passions. I enjoy building software and solving commercial problems, which is what I did during my time with Happeo. Today, I am building Anchor, an AI project designed for alienated fathers, and Substrat, which provides infrastructure for AI builders. I care deeply about these projects now, but they started as hard problems to solve, not childhood dreams.

I'll be honest with you, I still get things wrong regularly. I get distracted, I make bad angel investments, and I misjudge how long a software build will actually take. I haven't got this figured out. But when I look back at the moments where my life shifted in a significantly better direction, there is always a person standing at the intersection, handing me a very simple observation. You just have to be willing to listen, especially when they tell you to take the job with no salary.