Why doesn't advice work?

What if your grandmother was fit and knows what she's talking about? Just because someone isn't currently successful doesn’t mean they weren't successful in the past.

Many experts have differing opinions (especially in the expertise space). It also depends on how you define experts. Just being successful in the domain could be a result of luck.

This is one of the ways people can go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. They think they "discovered for themselves" some secret truth that "the elite" or "the experts" don't want them to know. Then they find a community of similarly-awakened people who lower their guards even more and point them to other "alternative truths" that they can go DiscoverForThemselves™ too.

Probably the same psychology behind those obnoxious AI-generated ads that say things like "Here's the secret about gut bacteria that doctors don't want you to know!"

I guess this is entirely tangential, but one of the stories in here resonated with me.

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!)

  > winding parables and directed self-learning are incredibly impactful.

For those of us with a spouse for whom direct advice is useless, please go on.

Will second that many times. As a fairly proactive guy who almost never leaves any loose ends in his relationships, I overdid giving the advice and some people started avoiding me. I was bitter about it until I realized they did not want their problem fixed, they sought sympathy.

Nothing wrong with that, it's just that my mind immediately jumps to potential solutions.

But I was severely humbled on that front after I have allowed a super dark period in my life (7-8 years, still ongoing but is now being actively attacked and positive signs are starting to get visible). I began to understand that there are also situations where you can't do almost anything but you still need a kind word.

So I started giving that and only vaguely hinting at the potential of an advice (so subtle that most people missed it which I am very okay with) and lo and behold, the new people in my life love chatting with me.

We have a saying in our country: "You can't force-feed wisdom and shove it down people's throats like you would do for a sick person who still needs food".