STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND READ THIS!
The Ignorant, the Interested, and the Invested
No man builds a life free of hands trying to steer it. Not one of us. The moment you decide to become a husband, a father, a builder of something that will outlast you, a crowd gathers, a crowd you never sent for, a crowd that arrived long before you had a chance to speak for yourself.
I did not choose the voices that surrounded me the day I became a husband, and then a father. I inherited them, the way every African child inherits them, before he has said a single word about how he intends to live. In my last piece, I spoke about needing a framework of role models to lean on while I found my footing as a new dad. What I did not say then is that finding those role models was the easier half of the work. The harder half, the half nobody prepares you for, was learning to sit inside a crowd and still hear my own voice underneath it.
The math nobody warns you about
The African child doesn’t just have parents. There is the nuclear family, mother, father, siblings. Then the extended family opens up, aunts, uncles, and grandparents on your father’s side, easily seven to ten people, then the same again, sometimes more, on your mother’s side. That is already close to twenty people before you have made a single major decision on your own. Marry, and you inherit your partner’s entire network too, their own twenty-something relatives, plus the pastors, church elders, and family friends who feel entitled to a seat at the table because they have known you since you were “this high.” Conservatively, fifty or more people believe their opinion should carry weight in how you run your one life.
Fail to develop discernment for navigating that crowd, and it will quietly wreck you.
I felt that weight directly, and it crystallized around something as intimate as a name, or in our case, two names at once. My wife gave birth to twin boys in a hospital in Ibadan, and even before I had properly held them, a tussle had already started over what they would be called. Yoruba tradition invites this, it is custom for people around a newborn to offer names, each one carrying its own hope or blessing for the child. I understood and welcomed that part of it. What I did not welcome was the pressure that followed when my wife and I had already chosen their first names, and multiple people insisted, with real conviction, that different names were “the ones” and should take that place instead. When I pushed back and held our choices, the pushback I received in return came with a scolding sharp enough to strain relationships that took time to repair.
I sat with that experience afterward and kept returning to one question. Who is the father of these boys? Whose sons are they, if not ours? Why should a voice from outside our marriage carry more weight over their first names than the two people who created them and would raise them? That naming tussle became the real foundation beneath everything I am about to lay out, because it forced me to ask, for the first time with any real seriousness, which of the fifty voices around me actually deserved a vote, and which simply assumed one.
I am someone who leans on pattern and structure to process anything overwhelming, so instead of drowning in the noise, I did what I know how to do. I sat with every person who had tried to speak into that decision, and every decision since, and sorted them, not by closeness, not by age, not by how loudly they had spoken, but by what was actually driving their advice. Three kinds of people emerged. The ignorant. The interested. The invested.
The Ignorant
Not ignorant in the insulting sense. Ignorant in the literal one, sincere people speaking confidently about a problem they have never actually lived. Of the fifty voices around me, how many had stood where I stood, a young man barely out of university, raising a child inside a world reshaped every eighteen months by the internet, social media, and a job market nothing like the one they came up in? Age gets mistaken for expertise constantly. Four traditions independently arrive at the same warning, each from a different direction.
Aristotle names the problem structurally, drawing a hard line between general life experience and phronesis, practical wisdom specific to a domain. An elder can be wise about marriage and still be entirely ignorant about building a career in tech. Ifa tradition enforces the same line institutionally rather than philosophically, a babalawo trains for years memorizing the corpus of Odu Ifa before he is trusted to counsel on serious matters, because in that tradition, age alone was never sufficient qualification, depth was. The Quran frames it as a moral hazard rather than a competence gap, warning believers in Surah Al-Isra against asserting what they have no actual knowledge of, since the ear, the eye, and the heart will each answer for what they claimed (17:36). And Job’s friends, in the oldest and rawest case study of them all, show us the emotional trap that catches even the well-meaning. Three men, sincere, certain, and completely wrong about Job’s situation, because they were speaking from a framework that never matched his actual reality. God rebukes them directly for it in Job 42:7. Sincerity was never proof of accuracy.
I lived this personally the day I decided to leave a stable job at a bank for a fast paced consulting firm. I had studied the growth trajectory carefully, weighed the kind of learning and exposure I needed to become the man I wanted to be years down the line, and concluded the bank simply wasn’t going to get me there. A good number of the people I brought this to sat firmly in the ignorant bucket, not out of malice, but because they were reading my situation off a blueprint that worked perfectly in their own generation and assumed it would still work in mine, with no real sense of how fast the job market was actually moving for someone my age. Some were furious I was even entertaining the idea. And for a while, I nearly folded under the sheer weight of their certainty, telling myself “these people are older, they should know better.” They didn’t, not about this. That move ended up reshaping my entire career. Had I respected my way into staying, out of deference rather than evidence, I doubt I would have the range I carry today.
The Interested
I remember sitting in my car outside a house viewing, phone against my ear, listening to someone I loved dearly explain, with total sincerity, why the flat two streets from theirs was obviously “the sensible choice for a young family.” The next person I mentioned it to made the identical case, for their own street. Neither one was lying to me. Both were arguing for whatever made their own life more convenient and calling it concern.
Yoruba tradition names the economics of this precisely, through the akewi, the praise singer, historically paid to sing whatever a patron wished heard, a bought voice everyone understood to speak for the payer, not the truth. Plutarch anatomizes the psychology of the same thing in an entire essay, How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, arguing that a flatterer’s counsel is shaped by what serves him and then dressed up to resemble concern for you. Twenty three centuries later, the family group chat is still proving him right. Islamic tradition draws the boundary from the opposite direction, defining what counsel must exclude to even qualify as counsel at all, the concept of nasihah, sincerity free of hidden motive, so central that a well known hadith holds religion itself to be nasihah. And scripture shows us what the wreckage looks like at national scale. Rehoboam inherited a kingdom and two camps of advisors, elders urging him to serve the people gently, and young companions urging him to rule harder than his father ever had. He chose the counsel that flattered his ego, and the kingdom split in two because of it (1 Kings 12). Advice that benefits the advisor is not automatically wrong. It simply needs a second look before you build a life on top of it.
That same bank decision handed me a textbook example of this bucket too. Someone pulled me aside and said, plainly, “so who will I call when I need to solve a problem at the bank, it makes sense for you to stay o.” No pretense of concern for my growth, just a comfortable arrangement they didn’t want disrupted. Others reached for something heavier, “why do you want to make a selfish decision, can’t you see this is your time to add value, given all we’ve done for you over the years.” That line is genuinely dangerous, because it dresses up someone else’s convenience as your debt, and a young, impressionable person, still eager to seem grateful and respectful, can easily mistake the guilt for wisdom and cave under it. I nearly did. The tell, once I learned to look for it, was simple, whose life gets easier if I say yes.
The Invested
Rare, and I am genuinely grateful for the few I have found. They do not lead with opinions. They lead with questions. Socrates gives us the method behind that instinct, insisting real wisdom begins not by handing someone an answer but by asking the questions that help them find their own. Jethro gives us the model in practice, watching Moses wear himself out judging every dispute alone, then offering a structure, delegate, appoint capable leaders, focus on what only you can do, and then stepping back without trying to run Israel through his son-in-law (Exodus 18). Ifa tradition gives us the boundary of responsibility, the babalawo who divines for you does not make the choice on your behalf, he lays out the path the Odu reveals and hands the walking of it back to you entirely. And the Quran gives us the spirit the whole exchange should be conducted in, shura, mutual consultation entered into for the collective good rather than personal gain (42:38). Proverbs puts words to what separates this group from the rest, “faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful” (27:6).
One older person, during that same bank decision, sat down with me and treated the whole thing like a puzzle we were solving together rather than a verdict he already had. We mapped out multiple scenarios side by side, staying at the bank versus taking the newer, less established name, what each path likely did to my development over five and ten years, not just the next twelve months. We ran the risk and the benefit against each other honestly, together, and the answer that came out the other side, leave the bank, was one I trusted completely, because I had helped build it rather than simply received it.
Becoming the third kind
I’ve come to believe that’s the harder, better ambition, not just learning to filter the advice you receive, but training yourself to become that third kind of person for the people coming up behind you. Not prescriptive. Not emotional. Focused entirely on helping a younger person think their own way through their own problem. It’s a quiet discipline, because ego makes the other two roads so much easier to wander onto without noticing. It is far simpler to hand someone your certainty than to sit with them in their uncertainty. And when a younger person doesn’t take your counsel, it’s tempting to reach for “they’re being disrespectful” before you reach for the harder, more honest question, am I actually ignorant of the world they’re building a life in, or is this an attachment I haven’t examined, one that would rather keep them close and stagnant than watch them fly further than I ever did.
The filter
Three questions now, matched to the three kinds of people. How competent is this person on this specific problem, not on life in general. How interested are they in the outcome, what do they stand to gain from the direction they are pushing me toward. How invested are they in me, are they asking about my situation or assuming it mirrors theirs.
None of this makes the ignorant person a bad person, or the interested person your enemy. It means their advice needs weighing, not swallowing whole. And the moment you stop swallowing it whole, especially from someone older, you will be called rude. Arrogant. “Who does he think he is.” Proverbs 12:15 says the way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but the one who listens to counsel is wise, and that verse is true precisely because it does not say listen to everyone. It says listen to counsel, and counsel has to earn that name first.
The real question was never whether you honored your elders. It never will be. The question is whether the decision in front of you moves your family forward, or simply quiets the crowd behind you.
The crowd will always be there. But the walking is yours. The consequences are yours. And so, in the end, must the choosing be.
I’d genuinely love to hear how you filter advice in your own life. Different framework, different names for the three, disagree entirely, drop it in the comments. Let’s talk.
Make sure you share so others can benefit.
