No one is short on advice, though advisers may be short on listeners.
Advice’s effective motif: Be brief.
Desiderius Erasmus understood this. As one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance, he had a profound effect on Europe’s shifting educational values. He retranslated the New Testament from the original Greek for the first time in more than 1,000 years, helping to make the Bible more accessible to laypeople. So great was his influence upon the Reformation that a German monk was noted to have said, “Erasmus posuit ova, Lutherus eduxit pullos”—Erasmus laid the eggs, Luther hatched them.
Those who read Erasmus today tend to only be familiar with his satirical essay “In Praise of Folly.” But his most successful book of all—the bestselling book of the 16th century, in fact—is a short treatise that most modern readers have never heard of….