Why Doesn't Advice Work?

1. It doesn't matter what your title is, how much expert education, training, or experience you have, or even what hard lessons that you have learned: you are not an "expert" in an area unless you are invited in as an "expert". Put another way, unsolicited advice is unwelcome.

2. Smart people want to solve their own problems. Don't offer solutions. No one will feel empowered or much of a sense of accomplishment implementing your solution. Instead tell them the challenges that they will face for various options and let them draw their own conclusions.

3. Your spouse just wants to vent, UNLESS they say "fix it" in which case they want you to fix it, where "fix" means "make it act like I want it to". Your spouse does not want to know how it works so that they can fix it themselves next time, and their mental model is wrong and they don't care to correct it. Just listen, figure out what they want and do it yourself, and do it again next time even though it interrupted you and they could have fixed it themself.

1. Unsolicited advice is always criticism.

2. LISTEN TO THEIR ACTUAL PROBLEM ALL THE WAY.

3. Never tell someone what they should do, tell them what you would do in that situation.

4. Remember that the purpose of giving advice is just to illuminate options, not to have someone follow what you recommend to the letter.

5. As the advice giver understand that you could be the one who is wrong.

It's never about trying to convince someone to do what you want, it's about showing them an option and letting them decide.

Intellectual-emotional dissonance is one of the biggest reasons people don't do things they know they should[1] be doing. We often have the mistaken approach that if we pile on more intellectual reasons why we should take the advice that the logic will outweigh our emotions and we will take the advice. But this isn't true at all.

Piling on more intellectual reasons creates a bigger gap between emotions and reason making the situation feel even more distressing. It's usually much more effective to find a way to help people's emotional sides keep up with their intellect, but we often devalue emotions so much that we even devalue approaching them at all even if it's to ameliorate them.

How to do this, is another comment for another time, but it's rewarding, as it helps us understand more about what makes us tick.

1. Ostensibly. Should statements themselves have their own issues. https://www.thinkingbugs.com/should-statements

Step 0 I think should be "maybe don't give advice". You want to help, you think you're really good, you think it will improve things, but that's not how other people see it. They may seem like they need advice or seem like they are asking for it between the lines, but they just really want to unload or chit chat, or share some difficulty. The answer to that is sometimes to listen and not give advice.

Yes, if someone asks for it, and they seem like they really are interested in it, by all means, give it to them. But in many cases, spraying advice around can be frustrating for both the givers and the (often unwilling) receivers of it.

I've also had a few experiences where someone gave me repeated advice that I rejected several times previous, until it finally "clicked" once.

I think the processing of advice is a communication; it takes two. The giver has to try, and the receiver has to be in a state that is receptive to hearing it. Neither side has full control. So overall, I think it's good to just keep trying, knowing that it'll only break through sometimes.

I had much in common with a childhood friend. We bonded over similar interests in electronics, then video games, then computers in elementary school. He was definitely smarter than me when he could motivate himself to learn things. But in retrospect, I had dogged persistence on my side. As we moved past high school, I went into the military but kept my computer interests while he went to an art school and sort of floundered for a number of years. Getting into and out of minimum wage jobs and various MLM schemes. After I got out of the military and starting my first IT job, I tried to convince him a few times that he would be awesome at the same things I was doing at the time and would make a lot more money than he was at the time. But I guess it just wasn't what he wanted.

Fast forward a decade or two and he now owns a very successful potato-chip distributing business where he lives and bootstrapped a second side-business doing video drone photography for real estate listings. I think we make about the same amount of money, except he doesn't have a desk job, gets many more vacations, and doesn't have to sit through multiple hours of meetings a day.

So it seems he turned out alright for him despite not taking my advice. (Or possibly anyone else's!)

When squatting, someone might tell you to "drive from the hips" or "knees out." When singing, someone might advise "diaphragm!" When coding, "DRY!" The obvious interpretation of these things don't stand on their own.

Cues aren't advice.

This bit is usually the crux.

It's not about your lived experience, but it has to be some lived experience that's felt viscerally. It can be your own, it can be in 2nd second person. It's about the feeling it drives. Not so much the frame/POV.

Good advice is visceral, limited, targeted and helps get the person to the immediate next 'better' state.

In military parlance, it's what helps you complete 1 single ooda loop. In ML parlance it's what helps complete 1 gradient update.

Big picture advice only works if the person has already built trust with associated mini-advice over many steps. In ML parlance, you can't increase the learning rate until you have high confidence in the direction of the gradient.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transtheoretical_model [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivational_interviewing

"People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others."

- Blaise Pascal, 1670

My guess is that each time somebody ignores a good advice, they do it for different reasons. So discovering the reason is the most impactful thing you can do.

And the tone and perspective of your advice counts for at least as much as the advice itself.

ADDED: How you react to people following, or not following, your advice is part of that "tone and perspective" stuff.

So many people have had the luxury of being physically attractive, in the right place at the right time, an upbringing that got them into social circles that would match them properly, a work environment that has potential partners, or having the fortune of being in a college where they could meet their partner. So many of these types of individuals will act as if romance is effortless because it really was for them. They never needed to do anything because life worked out that way just due to sheer luck. These types of individuals will be completely useless for dating advice (but will make up the majority of advice giving) because they’ve never struggled for a moment and never had to think about what they’re doing right/wrong.

“When in doubt, move your feet up.”

For giving good advice, I’d say the answer is don’t give advice.

It’s very rare to enjoy such a massive experience and information advantage that you can say “be the sword”, at just the right moment, to grant someone enlightenment.

Good “advice” is work - you solve a problem.

If you want to help, engage in problem solving. Which is miles better than giving good advice.

Most people are able to solve their own problems.

Heck - how many times have you sought advice only to be told something you already knew?

Most of the time ?

Generally, people need space/ time to think, resources, or to learn something about the world/ themselves.

Even what I’m saying isn’t new to you. At most it’s formulated in a different order or style, but it’s not new.

——-

If asked a question, a common response from me would be:

“this is the answer based on what you said, but it seems it would be obvious/ I suspect you have considered it. Am I missing something ?”

Typically the answer is “yes” and then I get better information.

If the answer is no, then I check why something obvious was missed.

——

NB : Problem solving means actually solving things, not throwing your hands up when someone doesn’t ‘follow your solution’.

A workable solution - works.

Good engineering considers the real world limits of the participants.

Everyone wants to be healthier - it’s finding the motivation, time, type of exercise, and the rest that matter.

And thats work. You may have to search, come up with ideas, or bring some relevant experience and memories to bear.

I'm really good at getting people to put advice into action in real life because of my marketing experience. I've helped multiple friends get jobs or change their lives. But I only give advice if I really think it's going to be impactful, so it's rare.

The biggest impact on whether your advice will be taken (or your ad will work) is giving specific examples rather than platitudes.

Also, obligatory Tolkien:

"Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill. But what would you? You have not told me all concerning yourself; and how then shall I choose better than you?"

And that's why I'd add to everything that's been said another pattern on why people don't listen to my advice: because I'm not rich.

Instead of considering that some knowledge is domain-specific, I've seen a trend in people valuing halo-style anything said by someone that's much more financially successful then them, regardless if this matters with the problem at hand. I'm not sure if this is something that's increased recently, just my anecdotal observation.

I really liked this particular framing.

Of course that’s because it concisely states what I’m already struggling to accomplish in a conversation, and the types of people I end up seeking or avoiding. It’s obviously not going to stop a willful asshole from doing what they do, they know their user experience is bad, and they enjoy it that way.

Another useful thing I eventually discovered that sticks with me is “Not all conversion is information exchange”.

A lot of the times when people talk, rather than wanting “facts or fixes”, what they are instead seeking to accomplish is to share, regulate or calibrate their emotions with other people. Smalltalk isn’t about the content (which will be forgotten), it’s about social bonding and a way of saying to someone “you matter enough to be with”. What they will remember is how they felt around you. For those like myself with some degree of alexithymia, it can be surprising just how much of an important factor emotions can play in the daily experience of other people.

Someone wrote a post that I can't find right now with a title like that - good advice accounts for the target's personal situation.

Good advice is not a list of winning lottery numbers, it's a description of a state transition; some state transitions are really hard and scary.

In my experience, when people ignore good advice, it seems like there's always a "z" factor keeping people off the line of advice and onto something else: waiting for another moment, or a desire for a different outcome, or a notion that there's something else that will reveal itself or alter the given path.

The challenge is finding/honoring the critical moment when the action in the advice has to be taken or a new set of circumstances establish themselves and the advice needs to be updated.

But then, I found myself depressed, disappointed, and betrayed in the US. I thought of her advice. "Be very careful." I knew i needed to be careful, I wanted to be careful. But what does being careful means?

She was right about what my life would turn into. Two decades later, my entire experience into the US boils down to Be Careful. It's not bad advice, but you have to unpack it. It's a zip file that only time and experience can decompress.

I try to share my experience, or a story, and hopefully some of it resonates.

The most annoying thing I'd hear from other business folk when I was running a company was "you know what I think you should do?"

Anecdotally, I have seen and `read` multiple founders' posts and comments detailing the mistakes they have made, year after year, month after month.. and I went and made most of the mistakes all over again. I still see others follow the same path.. But why don't we apply the advice we read so often and makes so much sense?

I believe while the reading the articles, the advice resonates and makes sense but when we go into real world, it gets messy.. It is harder to notice the patterns. But one thing is true, when we do make those mistakes, we can then hark back to that advice and realize the wisdom in them. Atleast after that, it gets easier to not fall into those traps again and the advice is internalized.

So, what is the use of writing about your hard-learned advice, you ask?

1. We start noticing the patterns earlier thanks to the memory of the advice humming there at the back of your mind and so the learning is faster. 2. It gives one courage and confidence to get up, dust oneself off and try again, cause others have done that before me or you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188

Even when I'm giving advice on a domain that I'm successful in, to a person that's similar to me, they rarely take it, so I've stopped giving it

The only thing that works is sharing truth. When you don't know what else to do except share advice, make sure you spend a lot of time explaining the truths behind it.

I was waiting for this angle. In my experience, at this point in my life, I've come to entertain the idea that humans are similar only on a surface level. We're genetically made of the same stuff, but our values, biases, even the basic axioms upon which each of us operates are vastly different. I've often felt that most people waste too many words to transfer a concept from their head into the heads of other people, preferring instead an abrupt, dry communication style to save time and energy and working off of the assumption that there's a vast, common emotional and intellectual knowledge base between humans. But I'm wrong and they're right. Use many words. Communicating ideas between humans is a craft and an art form. It's really difficult.

I don't know if it's an intelligence thing. I don't think it is. I have met not so smart people that are incredibly goal oriented and very smart people who piss it all away.

I'm at a point in my career/life where I often find myself giving advice to people who aren't interested in it. I've learned to limit the extent of the advice I give until people show that they know how to take advice. There are also likely strategies for giving advice depending on who you are talking to. I find that, especially for my spouse, direct advice is useless (...and that's when the fight started) but winding parables and directed self-learning are incredibly impactful.

If you know someone tends to want to vent, well, let them vent and only later offer, rather than give advice - if even that. They just like to vent. Fair.

If you know someone would love support that actually listens to the problem and thinks and offers words beyond the cliché. Well, then it will be well received. Fair also.

The problem is when you think venting is the only thing people do. Because then you can't be supportive in the way someone wants who is not venting. Or when you are oblivious and venting never came to your mind because that's not your communication style. And it shocks you when your advice is received with annoyance or anger.

Different people are different.

So now you can read the rest of the comments with a different perspective. Let's pick one: "Smart people want to solve their own problems." Well, actually... SOME smart people would love some support now and then even while they are smart. It's possible to be smart enough to understand that a different viewpoint or experience can be valuable. Most likely what the smart person doesn't want is the most bog standard cliché in response to their distress: they are smart, they found that cliché in their first google search a few years ago.

— Mary Schmich

> If you really want to have impact, focus on giving advice that is easy to follow.

Interesting. Tweaking it slightly: advice that is easy for the person you're advising to follow. This requires actually knowing them enough to know what would be easy or hard (including emotionally) for them to do. So, maybe if you don't know them that well, you should be cautious about giving advice...

Could be because the people around me are part of the topic (e.g. relationship problems), or they don't know the domain well or maybe it's not something I'm comfortable sharing with friends.

I keep thinking if this is a form of "social networking" that can be of benefit / some form of social good. Connecting people that have knowledge / wisdom in some particular aspect of life (I'm particularly biased towards the elderly, lots of life experience), but also more (hopefully) objective (they don't know you). Tinder for advise?

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/startups-should-...

Another case here:

https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...

I struggle with the question, "How do I manage upwards? How do I gain influence over the CEO?"

Often the problem is that there is a group of people who tell the CEO exactly what the CEO wants to hear. Some of these people are manipulative con artists, but others are folks who sincerely agree with the CEO.

So then the question becomes, "When multiple people give the CEO advice, how does the CEO know that my advice is the correct advice?"

The problems are well-illustrated in the article linked above. Does Alice have foibles? Does that make her unable to follow advice? Likewise with the CEO. Would the startup even be having so many problems if the CEO was more talented? If the CEO was smart enough to know that my advice was the correct advice then would the company be in trouble at all? Wouldn't the CEO have already foreseen and forestalled the problem from existing?

Step 0 - Ask "Would you like my advice?" Anything other than a sincere yes (not a maybe, not a patient okay, not a hmm) then don't give advice.

Giving advice is a bet; taking it is a risk. For both, awareness and context are key.

It might be more effective to refrain from giving advice. Instead of solving problems, we should focus on helping people recognize where they are and whether this place is in free fall: Does the ground seem further away than usual to you?

At the same time, it is socially inappropriate to tell someone you don’t want their advice because you disagree with their opinions/life decisions/etc.

Which is why, as a general rule, I think you should only take advice from people that have the same situation that you want to have - unless it’s negative advice not to do what they did.

2. Most people don’t know much about most things

3. It’s hard to tell good advice from the bad advice — and usually you can only see it in hindsight

4. Most people don’t want advice

Research shows people are much more likely to follow advice if they pay for it:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222563639_Do_We_Lis...

Skilled musicians with good mentors almost certainly listen to advice, because most of them very early had to figure out how to get rid of all their self learned terrible habits and then really paid attention because that sucks.

People in cultures with respect for seniority listen to advice, people who have served in the military tend to listen to advice.

I don't know who the author is but given some of their other articles I suspect they're surrounded by a lot of people who don't listen to advice... because that's exactly what they've been told since they've grown up (ironically maybe the first and last advice they listened to, technically). If you're in a culture that devalues mentorship, authority of teachers and where mistakes aren't really considered mistakes until you've made them yourself it's not that surprising that nobody ever takes advice.

They translate their knowledge of bio-mechanics and human anatomy to sensory information a non-expert can use to take action.

I think that may be the formula: Having trust as an authority and being able to communicate actionably. Miss either one and the "consumer" won't or can't take your advice.

You are receiving compressed knowledge while your capacity to accomplish goals is iterated through more complex experiences.

Like reading, advice needs to be unpacked, put into practice, reinterpreted, tweaked - to the point that whatever inputs came as words are now a network of ideas/experiences/memories/tricks.

In my opinion, the best advisers are those that understand people's personalities and adapt for them. Most people out there do not like thinking, but some people think A LOT, even too much. You can not give the same advice to both groups: "Think before you act" only will work with the first group. It will be just wrong for the second. "Act impulsivelly without thinking" will be much better, because they will think too much by default.

The same applies to any aspect of personality: extroversion and introversion. Openness, domination level... Someone is a visionary or loves to start projects but hates following through.

Most of the time the best advice is stopping doing what you hate and finding someone who loves it. If you are introverted and love spending time on your own like reading books do not try to go to meet people all the time selling stuff, let extroverted people do that. If you are extroverted, do not stay at home programming alone for hours. Let introverted people do that.

If you have a company you need to be a visionary and have great ideas about what the customer needs but at the same time you need to execute and implement on those ideas. Visionary/executor usually are opposite personalities. You need both in order to succeed. Most people try hard to be what they are not instead of looking for complementary personalities. I have seen so many solo founders destroy their life just because of not understanding this simple thing.

Those that ignore personality differences will give terrible advice. I have seen parents forcing on their children advice on something that was very difficult for the parents to understand but the children have different personalities and they don't have the same problem. They don't need the same advice because they are different to there parents.

Progressing from 0 to experience to decent can be fast if you’re willing to make second choices. Realize that as a novice, your first impulse is probably wrong. If it comes into conflict with the advice of people who know what they’re talking about, find a second or third impulse. Maybe you need a little more time to find that foothold.

This is a type of discipline, but a small discipline. It’s not about waking up at 4am and doing hours of drills every day. It’s about doing any amount of practice properly, even if there’s something that feels easier in the moment.

(This leads into another rant of why “find what works for you” is the antifreeze of advice - tasty and toxic. It takes people out of a learning mindset and puts them in a judging one.)

> What’s going on is that without some kind of direct experience to use as a touchstone, people don’t have the context that gives them a place in their minds to put the things you are telling them. The things you say often don’t stick, and the few things that do stick are often distorted. Also, most people aren’t very good at visualizing hypotheticals, at imagining what something they haven’t experienced might be like, or even what something they have experienced might be like if it were somewhat different.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188

http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...

1. Problem unaware

2. Problem aware

3. Solution aware

4. Implementation aware

5. Very aware

If you approach someone with advice about the best way to speed up their DB, but they don't think that their DB is slow, they won't listen to you.

If you approach someone with advice that RabbitMQ is the best message queue, but they have no idea what a message queue is, they won't listen to you.

You need to understand where a person is before you give advice. When talking with them, you need to adapt your language to their awareness level.

Problem unaware people either don't have a problem. If you want to give them advice, ask questions that will make them realize that there is a problem.

Problem aware people know that they have a problem but don't know that a solution exists. A while ago I knew that setting up my own MTA was a pain, but I did not know that SaaS email senders existed! When speaking to people like this, let them know that a solution exists for the problem, and see if they are interested in hearing more.

Solution aware people know that a solution exists, but don't know which particular solution is best for them. This is a good time to give advice and make them aware of a particular implementation.

Implementation aware people know about a sufficient solution for their problem, but might not be aware of how to fine-tune it, or about other solutions that offer a different set of tradeoffs. This is a time to have an in-depth conversation.

P.S. I adapted this from another framework called "Schwartz's five stages of awareness" https://vipcreative.co.uk/the-five-stages-of-awareness-and-h...

Everyone knows that 95% of advice is opinion. So they filter it out. That's why almost all advice doesn't move the needle.

The clear exception to this rule is when you see that someone has done something that might get them killed - forgotten to tie into the rope, clip into the anchor, etc.

This also applies to laboratory and manufacturing work with dangerous chemicals and equipment. If people can't follow protocols designed to keep them from serious injury, even after it's been explained to them repeatedly why those protocols exist, the only advice worth giving is 'find another career where you're less likely to poison/maim yourself and your co-workers.' This tends to cause interpersonal conflict, so such people are often instead promoted into a position where they can do little harm. Some people even game this, hoping a display of incompetence will keep them from being assigned difficult work.

It's thus usually best to keep your advice to yourself when dealing with other adults, unless they come to you and say "I'm stuck, what do you think I should do with this problem?"

Of course in practice most advisors won't do it which essentially means that they do not know or have cared to understand all nuances involved.

One could appeal to the publishers better nature, confront the shenanigans, or recommend a fiscally advantageous posture. Yet, after all is said and done... the appeal of duping people will hijack the commonsense region in some peoples brains.

Anecdotally, I have observed people tend to double-down on mistakes, especially when their ego is involved in that decision process.

What was truly amazing is the level of engagement well structured nonsense can solicit. =3

I ask and follow people’s advice all the time, and people ask and follow my advice all the time.

I need a new car? I’ll ask to the guy-I-know-who-knows-about-cars.

My in-laws want a new computer? I’ll happily tell them about the pros and cons of computer x and y.

At work, everyone asks everyone what they think is the best course of action.

And somehow it happened to me a handful of times that a random friend of mine tells me that their successful career started because of some advice I gave them. It’s a very rewarding thing.

Some people don’t take exactly your words, some people don’t follow anything, but god, don’t make it a generality…

Advice has the connotation of being the conclusion of the discovery of the problem. When the recipient doesn't understand or won't act on the advice, it should be the start of the conversation, more questioning than stated suggestions, like in the hinting examples about coffee. In most situations, a lot of that conversation will be about getting the advice recipient to agree there is a problem to solve. Not everyone will be willing to have that conversation long enough to see there is a problem.

For instance, in golf you'll often see instructors on YouTube or in a blog say that you need to "create lag" and to have "shaft lean at impact" when describing the ideal state of the golf swing at certain intervals. But these are missing the point entirely - you don't force lag or shaft lean. They are byproducts of other swing mechanics and will occur when those mechanics are performed well and in proper sequence with good timing.

You see this happen where the effect is mistaken for the cause. So of course the person doesn't take the advice because they fundamentally misunderstand the problem to be solved or the actions required to get into the state that indicates good form. The outcome is mistaken for the process.

I know I can’t be the only one who feels this way. An anonymous blog is like food found in the street.

I half expect every anonymous blog to be revealed as a Dow Chemical marketing experiment.

I liked what this “guy” had to say in this piece about advice. I would have subscribed if he were an identifiable person.

My name is James Bach, and I wrote this comment.

If you contradict them, they get upset.

Internet wisdom.

Most of the time, there are multiple ways of doing something, with trade offs, and advice is just one choice in that space. People who are actually doing things get to make that choice.

Language can only describe a tiny fraction of human experience. I think this is where language based advice for physical things starts to break down (e.g. please explain exactly how I should move my arm, hand and fingers to pick up a cup of coffee).

This has lead me to think the best thing you can do for yourself is to just ask a select few people who you really trust for advice. You still might not listen but at least you'll go into a decision knowing you're not listening to any of the advice you received.

That’s pretty much it.

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40936357

That is my list of successes at 45 years of age.

Can anyone confirm either way?

How can will-power be measured though?

There was serious push back. Mind your own beeswax.

Advice can be seen as the slippery slope to coercion and manipulation.

    How do you win a race against Usain Bolt?

    Just run faster than him!

The thing is, when you are giving advice, you are usually missing a lot of context. Context you may not know exists, and that the other person won't or can't share with you. Maybe the other person doesn't even realize this context is needed or is aware of it.

But if you had this context, you would understand how unpractical your advice is to this particular situation, because it's too generic. Too theoretical.

After all, most smokers know they should quit, most fat people know they should lose weight. If it was just about hearing the right path, we would have little problems we can't solve.

But knowing where you should go tells you less than expected about the path ahead because of the aforementioned missing context, such as where you start from and the obstacles in your way, whether you'll be alone on the road or with friends or wild animals, if you have to carry a big bag, if you need to forage for food and if it rains.

That doesn't make advice useless.

But you should not expect to see the effect right now. Rather, they may contribute to a self-realization that the person has to build for themself, adapted to themself. It takes time, it's hard, and there are a lot of other things that fight for being a priority.

Assuming it was good advice to begin with of course, and there are not that many good advice to go around.

Is willpower even a large factor in habit formation? Isn’t that just a myth?

> Why? Probably because running is hard. I maintain that if you run the right way, it isn’t nearly as hard as it first seems. But it’s still hard. Buying headphones or installing an air purifier is incredibly easy.

Yeah running is hard. That’s what I thought for the first 38 years of my life. I was “running hard” like you’re supposed to. Then I overheard that, for aerobic fitness, it’s best to stick to “Zone 2” for maybe 80% of your running time. What, really?

So much more comfortable. In fact it can be invigorating.

So why did it take so long (and happenstance) to figure this out? When this is apparently what serious aerobic runners do nowadays? On one hand I’m not that surprised when I look at fitness (not sports, just recreational fitness) itself: lots of ego and self-identity around having the willpower (allegedly) to stick to their particular fitness regime, which includes othering those who do not.

If they should try yoga, and you are certain it would help them, pay for 6 months of membership at the gym for them, show up at their house every morning at 5am to pick them up for class, and do the darn yoga with them.

Sorry to be a grump, but one has to make a personal project out of people to get them to benefit from advice that they hadn't already decided to follow.

As a concrete example: I have very poor executive function, and it was much worse in the past than it is today. I got a lot of advice for how to deal with that, but a lot of that advice involved strategies that work great when you have executive function and terribly when you don't. "Oh, just set a reward and have it after you do the thing", for example, only works if you can actually set and stick to such a rule. If you can't, it's useless.

What I had to learn was ways to route around the way my brain works. I am, as far as I can tell, basically incapable of feeling a reward that's more than a day or two away. (Yes, this is a weird trait to have as someone trying to run a company.) But that doesn't mean I can't pursue long-term rewards: it means I have to restructure them into shorter-term rewards that I can feel. I don't think about what will happen when my company succeeds in the long term. I think about "okay, I've done all the things on this to-do list for today, and now I can relax and go do something that isn't work for a while and not feel guilty about not working". That's a reward that works with the way my brain functions.

That understanding, in turn, required a sequence of steps that couldn't be easily skipped over. You have to do step N before you can do step N+1, because step N+1 often does not even make sense until step N is done. To quote my favorite book [1]:

> “It is good,” he thought, “to get a taste of everything for oneself, which one needs to know. That lust for the world and riches do not belong to the good things, I have already learned as a child. I have known it for a long time, but I have experienced only now. And now I know it, don’t just know it in my memory, but in my eyes, in my heart, in my stomach. Good for me, to know this!”

> [...] Therefore, he had to go out into the world, lose himself to lust and power, to woman and money, had to become a merchant, a dice-gambler, a drinker, and a greedy person, until the priest and Samana in him was dead. Therefore, he had to continue bearing these ugly years, bearing the disgust, the teachings, the pointlessness of a dreary and wasted life up to the end, up to bitter despair, until Siddhartha the lustful, Siddhartha the greedy could also die.

I couldn't have skipped to my current understanding of motivation from the point I was at five or ten years ago. I had to go through a sequence of steps to understand progressively more of it. I had to see what a ruin my life could be without long-term thinking to understand that it was important to work on in the first place. I had to be pushed into an environment with very short-term tasks to see that a motivated version of myself was possible at all. And I had to go back to being out of work for a bit to see that the improvements I'd made weren't permanent and that that fundamental dysfunction could still come back without the right structure.

None of these steps would have made sense in isolation. Each made sense only in light of the previous one. And they had to start at the beginning.

-----

So when I'm giving advice, I try to frame it in terms of how I learned the lesson, as it looked from the inside. Here's an example, from a post [2] I made here on HN a while back, discussing my understanding of [disordered] anxiety:

> Before I got hired on to my first proper job at Triplebyte, my life was not going very well. Employers wouldn't give me the time of day, I had no idea what (if anything) I was good at, and I didn't have any direction; this era of my life involved bad enough mental health that it very very nearly killed me. It wasn't just anxiety, but anxiety was certainly a part of it. I'd spend almost every night with my head going in loops I'm sure you'll recognize: "I didn't do anything today so I'll never do anything so I'll always be miserable and it's all my fault" being the gist.

> Fast-forward a bit. I was about six weeks into my new job, and everything in my life was turning around in a way that seemed almost miraculous. But I found myself in bed ruminating anyway. That voice in my head did not acknowledge any of the ways my life had improved. It didn't care that my income had gone up an order of magnitude, that I'd found a community of people I loved, that I seemed to actually be good at something. What it cared about is that I hadn't done anything else. It pulled up every example it could find where I'd done less than perfectly during that time. I'd screwed up something at work that I felt bad about. I wasn't getting out and socializing as much as I'd like to. I wasn't exercising. Look at all these ways I was screwing up that would ruin my life!

> But the benefit of having such a dramatic change in circumstances is that it makes the ways in which that voice doesn't care about reality much more obvious. I remember having a clarifying moment of "wait, wait, wait, hold on, everything is WAY better than it used to be, why the hell does this voice sound exactly the same?" It became clear to me in that moment that that anxious/self-critical voice (anxiety and depression are one voice in my head) clearly wasn't coming from my circumstances, because my circumstances had changed dramatically and the voice hadn't.

The thrust of this discussion, of course, is the idea that your anxiety probably isn't coming from your circumstances either. But framing it as a realization about my own process of understanding:

- starts from the perspective of what the problem "looks like from the inside"

- provides a framework for how to take the next step for someone who is at an earlier one

- provides an external pattern to look at that can help them recognize their own patterns and find the next step in the first place

- removes their ego from the equation by being about how I was wrong about something then, rather than telling them how they are wrong now

See [3] for a longer example of the same idea.

-----

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2500/pg2500-images.html [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40191179 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40978749

...

"Reframing alone isn’t enough, of course. That’s where Dr. Ornish’s other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren’t eating everything they want, but they aren’t making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish’s tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. “These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator,” he says. “When people who have had so much chest pain that they can’t work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, ‘These are choices worth making.’ ” While it’s astonishing that most patients in Ornish’s demanding program stick with it, studies show that two-thirds of patients who are prescribed statin drugs (which are highly effective at cutting cholesterol) stop taking them within one year. What could possibly be a smaller or easier lifestyle change than popping a pill every day? But Ornish says patients stop taking the drug because it doesn’t actually make them feel any better. It doesn’t deal with causes of high cholesterol, such as obesity, that make people feel unhealthy. The paradox holds that big changes are easier than small ones. Research shows that this idea applies to the business realm as well. Bain & Co., the management consulting firm, studied 21 recent corporate transformations and found that most were “substantially completed” in only two years or less while none took more than three years. The means were drastic: In almost every case, the CEOs fired most of the top management. Almost always, the companies enjoyed quick, tangible results, and their stock prices rose 250% a year on average as they revived. IBM’s turnaround hinged on a radical shift in focus from selling computer hardware to providing “services,” which meant helping customers build and run their information-technology operations. This required a momentous cultural switch — IBMers would have to recommend that a client buy from competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft when it was in the client’s interest. But the radical shift worked: Services have grown into IBM’s core business and the key to its success. Of course, radical change often isn’t possible in business situations. Still, it’s always important to identify, achieve, and celebrate some quick, positive results for the vital emotional lifts that they provide. Harvard’s Kotter believes in the importance of “short-term wins” for companies, meaning “victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum. Without sufficient wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous, and meaningful to others, change efforts invariably run into serious problems."

via:

"FastCompany; By Alan Deutschman: Change or Die ; All leadership comes down to this: changing people’s behavior. Why is that so damn hard? Science offers some surprising new answers — and ways to do better."

https://archive.md/FvqlE#selection-825.527-884.0

Back then, no one could precisely know, and on a tactical level, advice was bad - the missing thing is that Soviet nuclear weapon stocks especially mated to delivery vehicles were many times smaller than believed, so any probable scenario lead to either a clean U.S. victory/Soviet capitulation and dismantlement of Communism, or simply thorough elimination of all Eastern Bloc.