Who is sitting on the other side of the table
Posted on: 1 June 2026
In the last month I heard the same sentence spoken twice, word for word, and on each occasion it meant something quite different. The first time it came from a friend who had nothing to sell me, over coffee, while I was trying to work out whether to walk away from a job that was grinding me down. The second came from a man in a jacket who was, that same month, explaining where it would be sensible to move some savings. Both said: I'm telling you this because I want what's best for you. The same words, near enough the same inflection, the same direct gaze that's meant to signal sincerity.
One was true. The other was a sale dressed up as concern, and I only realised much later, when I saw how much he stood to gain from my sensible choice.
The point isn't that one of them lied. The point is that the words were identical and contained no information whatsoever about which one to trust. None. The sentence, taken on its own, was inert. Everything that mattered sat somewhere else, in a place the sentence did not reveal and in fact concealed: who collected something if I followed it.
We almost always do the wrong thing. We judge advice by how it sounds. If it's well constructed, if the person giving it seems competent, if the logic holds, if the gaze is steady, then we trust it. It's an old reflex, probably useful for a hundred thousand years inside small groups where the person speaking to you was your aunt or the head of the hunt and their interests largely coincided with yours. But it's a reflex that betrays us systematically now, because we've decoupled two things we still treat as one: how right advice sounds, and how reliable it is.
They are decoupled. Worse: they often run in opposite directions. The person with most to gain from convincing you is precisely the person who has invested most in polishing the words. The friend over coffee hadn't prepared anything, mumbled, corrected himself, at one point said "look, I might be wrong about this." The man in the jacket had a narrative as smooth as a river stone. A lifetime spent polishing those sentences. The fluency wasn't a sign of truth, it was a sign of practice, and the practice came from the fact that he repeated those sentences to everyone, because to everyone he was selling the same thing.
Run a handful of examples in your head and let the same sentence pass through different mouths. This is the right choice for your family. Said by your mother or said by the estate agent who collects the commission on completion. Identical, opposite. This structure would suit you better, it's more efficient. Said by a colleague who has no stake or said by the accountant who will then run that structure for a recurring fee. Trust me, in this case the procedure is the better option. Said by an NHS doctor who gains nothing or said by a doctor with a stake in the clinic where the procedure is done. The words don't shift by a millimetre. What shifts, and changes everything, is where the person uttering them is sitting.
I learnt to do one thing, and it cost me several years and one or two expensive mistakes. Before I ask whether a piece of advice is good, I ask who is better off if I follow it. Not cynically, not assuming everyone is out to take me. Most of the time they aren't. But the question has to be asked anyway, because the answer is information the sentence will never volunteer. If the person advising me remains exactly as they were, whichever way I decide, then I can weigh the advice on what it says. If the person advising me collects something, gains a client, hits a number, takes home a commission, then the advice is no longer advice, it's a position. And a position is weighed differently from an opinion.
There's a subtlety that makes the trap almost perfect, which is that very often the person selling you something sincerely believes they're doing you a favour. It isn't conscious hypocrisy. The man in the jacket probably did think the move was sensible. The point is that his brain had found a way to make his own interest coincide with my benefit, because it is enormously easier to sell something well when you're convinced you're on the right side of it. Sincerity is not a guarantee. If anything, it is the most powerful sales instrument in existence, precisely because it isn't simulated.
None of this means becoming suspicious of anyone who opens their mouth. That would be exhausting and wrong, and in fact most of the people who give us advice gain nothing by it, and that advice should be taken for what it's worth, which is sometimes a great deal. What it means is something narrower and more useful: stop reading the advice and start reading the table. Who's there. What they take home. Whether they win when I lose, or lose with me.
The most naked example I've come across recently was an adviser, though I prefer to call him a salesman, tied to a single house, who used a formula about putting what matters most to you at the heart of everything. A formula I could have written myself, word for word, in a context where it would have meant the exact opposite. He could recommend nothing other than the products of his house, whatever happened to be right for me. The hands tied, the tie straight, the gaze sincere. Three things that looked like signals of reliability and were, read properly, the confession of the problem.
The difference between good counsel and a well-made sale rarely lies in the words. It lies in who's sitting on the other side of the table, and in what happens to him when you get up to leave.