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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  8mo ago (greyenlightenment.com)   2175 thread views

Why does advice work so poorly?

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I mean, "work harder and smarter" is good "advice" in this sense for at least 95% of people. Heck, "Make all the right decisions and don't make mistakes" is even better; 100% of people would benefit from that.

Advice is more than just [things it would be good if people do]; there's a sense in which it actually has to be useful, insightful information. In this much more relevant sense, most advice is bad, because it's not useful or insightful.

I mean sure, but most advice isn’t “just do the right things.” It’s generally at least something the person understands how to do. Work smarter, not harder is advice if you define or explain what that means. Setting a specific goal using SMART frameworks is good advice.

But assuming the advice is actually good advice as in useful to the person receiving it, a bigger problem is that the person doesn’t want to do the work, doesn’t want the grind, doesn’t want to miss out on fun to reach the goal. Quite often they blame the advice when it wasn’t bad advice so much as you made excuses for not doing it. I think there are plenty of things I could be getting better at, I know exactly what to do, but it’s just hard to follow through. And if I don’t, it doesn’t mean that the advice sucked. The advice is fine. The problem is me, and placing the blame in other places is not helpful.

It’s generally at least something the person understands how to do.

My point is that "just work harder" is to some extent something people (me) don't understand how to do, so everything that hinges on this (most advice) falls into this category. There is a lot more to discipline and human psychology than just flexing your indomitable human spirit if you want something hard enough.

"Work harder" isn't bad advice so to speak but it's not that useful. So, by extension, "Just wake up every morning and exercise for 30 minutes" is also not necessarily that useful.

"Work harder" isn't bad advice so to speak but it's not that useful.

This gets into the core problem with much advice: It is rarely actionable and usually of the form "you should be like this" instead of "you should do this specific thing that you both know how to do and are capable of currently doing".

A classic example is "eat less to lose weight" which isn't actionable for most people (they'll just get hungry and fail to eat less) as opposed to for example "log every meal and snack you eat to make it easier to avoid pointless eating and try to eat these sorts of foods that keep you satiated longer".

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