Most advice is pretty bad

I do NOT agree that advice that "isn’t insightful" or "is obvious" is bad advice.

The author complains that "Work hard" is bad advice, and I don't agree. Some people I meet are not willing to work hard. You may think it's obvious, but that doesn't mean it really is obvious. Even if it's obvious, people often need reminding of obvious things, because "obvious" things are easy to forget.

Vince Lombardi was famous at starting training from the beginning. He would start his training courses by telling highly-trained athletes, “this is a football.” https://jamesclear.com/vince-lombardi-fundamentals Excellent athletes continually train and excercise the fundamentals, because they are fundamental. "Obvious" things do require reminders. They require reminders because they're boring, & we often want to shift to the novel thing instead of focusing on the important thing.

Even worse, if it's novel, then it's often wrong. Sometimes the new can be really helpful - but seeking novelty for its own sake misses the point. You want good advice, not novel advice, and the two are not the same thing.

The important point I got out of the article, wasn't that most advice is bad, which seems clearly true, but a theory as to why:

1) Not novel - it just repeats what everyone already know, but maybe with a new anecdote! 2) Not actionable - the advice to vague to be practicable, good advice needs to be more specific which probably mean not applicable to everyone, which means not oprah scale. 3) Not based on evidence - why does this advice work, as opposed to being survivorship bias or junk extrapolation of real research.

I was hoping the article was going to talk about how much advice comes from survivorship bias and people's general inability to see the difference between cause and correlation of what they are recommending and true effect. On this subject, I could rant.

As others have pointed, "non-obvious advice" doesn't inherently have any reason it's better. The vast majority of people I know who struggle with problems aren't struggling because they haven't been told helpful advice, it's because of some combination of lack of conviction of the advice, lack of discipline, and in some cases (as the author points out) is hard to discover how to take the advice . (While advice that lays out clear actionability is good advice, I don't think that advice that is more general is bad advice.)

Take diet. I think you'd be hard pressed to find people who said salads were unhealthy. I believe most know that they would lead to less heart problems in the US, they are cheaper, and would help lose weight.

The more I have gone into philosophy and that path of many successful people, most of them have taken to simplifying everything they do. It's said that only masters can truly simplify. It's the amateur who overly complicates. But I digress; I firmly believe that obvious advice is often the most useful. Personally and professionally, most of the problems with advice that arise is that it wasn't followed, not that it needed to be non-obvious.