Gimme a Smile: Good advice you might not want to take

Published 11:30 am Saturday, July 25, 2026

Everywhere you go, you will find someone who longs to give you advice — sometimes even good advice. You don’t always have to take it. Here are some examples of good advice you might not want to take.

Eat your vegetables. They provide fiber, nutrients, variety in your diet, blah, blah, blah. This is the number one piece of good advice that you will encounter. But sometimes vegetables are the last thing you want to eat, like when there’s a parasite infecting your fresh greens and succulent strawberries, or when someone serves you okra and you can’t abide the smell, much less the slimy texture. Chocolate donuts, anyone?

Clean your plate. This is a contractual arrangement between parent and child — if the child cleans their plate, the parent will provide dessert. No clean plate, no dessert. It’s as simple as that. If this childhood lesson has followed you into adulthood, compelling you to eat every morsel to achieve the desired level of clean-platedness, you should consider the hidden pitfalls in this practice. If you thoroughly clean your plate at dinner, leaving no trace that food ever touched its glossy surface, you risk having the plate returned to the cupboard as if it were actually clean. There, in the darkness behind closed doors in the kitchen, bacteria can grow on your supposedly clean plate, lying in wait for you to pile on a fresh helping of vegetables at your next meal.

Save room for dessert. No need to worry about this one. Any kid can tell you that even if your dinner stomach is full, your dessert stomach has plenty of room left for that ice cream sundae. Go ahead, eat all your vegetables and clean your plate!

Smile for the camera. We are trained from babyhood to flash a big smile whenever anyone waves a camera in our direction. Cameras are literally everywhere. Chances are that you can look around right this minute and spy a camera spying on you without ever having to take a step. Do you always want to smile for these cameras? If you’re in the midst of robbing a bank or slipping your bag of trash into your neighbor’s garbage can, there’s no need to make things easy for law enforcement by gifting them the smiling image of your face. Scowl for the camera if you want to.

Don’t be late. For some incomprehensible reason, punctuality is seen as a virtue. You’re expected to arrive for an appointment or event on time, even if the doctor leaves you stranded in a paper gown for half an hour or the concert intermission lasts 25 minutes when the program threatens dire consequences if you’re not back in your seat in 10. If anyone is going to be late, it had better not be you.

Don’t be early. On the flip side, politeness dictates that being early can be worse than being late. No one wants to entertain a guest before the last-minute vacuuming has been brought to a successful conclusion. If you shouldn’t be late but you can’t be early, what are you supposed to do? Be exactly on time, of course. To accomplish this, you need to arrive early and then skulk in the shadows until the exact time arrives. But beware of surveillance cameras patrolling the shadows for illicit skulkers. In this case, you might actually want to smile for the camera.

Just be yourself. This shouldn’t be hard advice to follow — who else could you possibly be? Let’s say you’re an actor playing a mad scientist on stage. You don’t want people to think that you’re just being yourself, do you? It’s amazing how easily you can manipulate what people think about you. Simply tell them about your acting career, leaving it up to them to try to guess which moment you’re just being yourself. This subterfuge is all the more satisfying if you’ve never set foot on the stage but are a lowly essay writer in real life.

In the end, it’s important to remember who is in charge in your own life. Take my advice, you don’t have to take all the good advice you’re given.

Peggy McKee Barnhill is a wife, mother, and author who writes cozy mysteries under the pen name “Greta McKennan.” She likes to look at the bright side of life.