Or: the strange career advice given to people who sell truth for a living.

There’s a particular kind of person whose work only works if it’s honest. The artist, the filmmaker, the writer, the musician, the painter, the journalist, the yoga teacher. We’re the ones who help people see who they are, even if we don’t mean to. Our products are different, but the raw material is the same: ourselves, held up to society like a mirror. Take out the truth and what’s left is decoration. Expensive, shiny decoration? Sometimes. But decoration.

And every one of us, sooner or later, gets “the talk.”

It usually comes wrapped in love, with the warm concern of someone handing you sunscreen before you walk into an angry sun.

“Read the market. Soften the edges. Be a bit more like that guy who did well last year.”

Pause!

“He sold a lot.”

And then, gently: “Maybe change the… well, you.”

Let me make sure I understand this correctly. My job is to help people find themselves, be true to themselves, and stop performing. And the professional advice is that I should become someone else in order to sell it. It’s like telling a butcher business would pick up if he switched to cupcakes. Vegan ones.

So basically, preach what I don’t practice. The perfect business model, assuming nobody is paying attention. And if they are, distract them. That’s what marketing is for. Namaste.

I’ve spent a long time watching this, carefully, in the two scenes I know best: film and yoga. I don’t want to generalize. But the majority makes the rules, and the majority, as far as I can see, shares one problem. We don’t know who we are. So we run after whatever sells, and hand the steering wheel to whoever is buying. They shape us however they please, and we call it a career.

The irony is almost too neat. Filmmakers are supposed to express themselves. Yogis are supposed to teach people how to find themselves. Both are lost. And these happen to be two of the many professions shaping how everyone else sees themselves. The lost, teaching the lost how to get more lost. With Chinese subtitles for Arab audiences. And a crystal eye mask during Savasana.

The voice doesn’t vanish in one dramatic sale. It gets sanded down quietly, one reasonable adjustment at a time, until it’s a pleasant whisper that fits every room. I’ve met a lot of artists. I’ve rarely met a true voice. Not because the talent is missing, but because the fear moved in first. And then they built it up, brick by brick.

Fear is social. It likes company. It’s much easier to make the trade when everyone around you has made it too. So it gets passed on as wisdom, mentor to student, peer to peer, with the best intentions in the world. Somewhere along the way, a lot of truth gets buried. With full honors, of course.

The excuse is always the same: money is important.

As if I said it isn’t. Rent is real. Bills don’t care about your authenticity. I’m not asking anyone to take a vow of poverty. But most people don’t actually want money. They want lots of it. More than the guy next to them. That’s a different animal.

The people giving the advice aren’t villains; most of them once arrived with something true to say, and then met the same rent I’m meeting now. They aren’t wrong about the price. I just don’t think they’ve noticed what they paid. I know, because I didn’t notice either, the times I paid it. But why do we give in so quickly?

And what the payment buys is a lane in the rat race, a race built so you always feel like you’re losing, no matter how fast you run. So we self-medicate with small doses of high. An Instagram reel posted. A participation trophy. A “so proud of this one” caption. A “good job” from people running the same race. It works for an evening. Then the race resumes, and the trap tightens. A prison with flattering lighting.

So here’s my question: how afraid are we? Afraid enough, it seems, to trim off the very thing we got into this for, and call it growing up.

Am I immune? No. Some nights I lie awake doing the math on what it would cost to be a little less me, and how much easier the month would be. The fear lives in me too. The difference, maybe, is that I still recognize it as fear, not as advice.

Because it was never money versus no money. It’s about what you’re willing to trade for it. I don’t need a G-Class to prove anything. I walked to the café next door to write this very post. Total commute: four minutes. Total horsepower: two legs. One decaf flat white, and lots and lots of gratitude.

What I got in exchange is the one thing the market can’t sell me: freedom. Control over my own mind and my own emotions. A compass that points somewhere I chose. No need to check where I rank against anyone else. And knowing the difference between my passion and my purpose, then following the purpose with everything I’ve got.

I spent forty years trying to find myself. Sixteen of them on a yoga mat as a student, slowly peeling back the layers. I’m only now learning to express what I found, through the lens of cinema and with pen and paper. And now that I’m the one teaching, standing at the front of the room, helping others make the same journey, this is the moment I’m supposed to change? Sixteen years of practice, undone by one marketing meeting. My new mantra in class would be: “Now close your eyes and connect with your true self. Mine is under renovation.”

So no, I won’t adjust to the market. I won’t bow my head to money and tear down what took me forty years to build. I’ll make my films. I’ll write my books, and blogs like this one. I’ll adjust my posture, my breath, and occasionally my prices. And the work will find the people looking for their own truth, one at a time.

It won’t go viral. Truth rarely does.