What if everything you've been told about success, happiness, and "living your best life" is wrong?
99 pieces of hard-won life advice for $9.99. That's effectively ten cents apiece, cheaper than the bullshit you get for free.
Life Advice Is Bullshit is a contrarian, story-driven field manual that dismantles the comforting clichés you've been fed about career, money, relationships, and "doing life right." Written as a brutally honest legacy letter to his two sons, Slade and Logan, Tom Laszewski shows that most life advice is time-bound, local, and shaped by fear, trauma, and culture-not universal truth.
Why trust a guy who says your advice is bullshit? Tom isn't a motivational speaker selling dreams. He's a cardiac arrest survivor, a single dad, and a former Oracle and AWS leader who learned life's hardest lessons by failing spectacularly and rebuilding from scratch. He grew up in small-town Wisconsin, where his father survived the Depression on lard-laden bread and handed down rules like "get a safe job at a big company, stay loyal, don't take risks, keep your mouth shut." Those rules made sense in his dad's world. They became toxic when passed down as one-size-fits-all wisdom.
Beneath the myth-busting is a deeper thesis: humans are not primarily thinking beings. We are impulsive, tribal animals driven by fear, scarcity, and inherited scripts. Instead of handing you another set of rules, this book teaches you to spot patterns, question the stories you inherited, and build a life that is actually yours.
It reads like sitting across from someone who gives a damn about you. You'll go fishing with Tom's silent father on desolate Wisconsin lakes, ride along on his mother's Sunday "safaris" through country bars, sit in on boardroom battles in corporate America, and follow his journey from invincibility to humility after his heart literally stopped.
Raw, profane, darkly funny, and relentlessly practical, Life Advice Is Bullshit is the anti-self-help book that might actually help. It's Tom's gift to his sons-and now to you.
Nine Core Laws Built for System Thinkers:
- Audit Your Inputs: Family, school, algorithms, and feeds installed code you never vetted. Debug your system constantly and filter out external noise
- Build for Failure: Grit isn't about avoiding a crash; it's about having the failover, backup plans, and habits to reboot every time you get hit
- Open Source Your Life: Closed systems accumulate technical debt in silence. Expose your bugs, own your scars, and build trust through radical transparency.
- Quality Over Quantity in Your Network: Focus on a tight core of trusted relationships, prune toxic nodes, and practice zero blind loyalty to corporate "families.
- Calibrate Your Bullshit Detector: Differentiate between liars and bullshitters. Pre-flag high-noise sources and judge the payload-not the presentation.
- Let the Long Game Compound: Reinvest your time and skills instead of cashing out early for quick dopamine. The exponential curve rewards long-term allocation.
- Triage Your Attention: Execute a strict Do, Delegate, Drop framework. Stop trying to optimize a task queue that shouldn't exist, and accept that 70% done is done.
- Master Life's Paradoxes: Life isn't binary. Hold contradictory states-be confident yet humble, ambitious yet grateful-and move people through narrative rather than raw data.
- Focus on the 95% Basics: Strip away status games and wellness hacks. Real compounding yield comes from sleep, movement, presence, and acting before life's windows close
The truth will set you free. Even if it pisses you off first.
Book One of the is Bullshit series.
