Why doesn't advice work?

Careful to not get sucked into a binary trap. Most (but not all) problems exist on a gradient you can often be "right enough", "fast enough", and as uncomfortable as it seems we can be "correct enough" or even "coherent enough" to succeed.

Hard lessons I've learned:

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.

I've given a bunch of advice in my life, some was useful, some missed the mark, and over time after learning to listen to people, I think I've gotten reasonably good at it.

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 often wonder—how different are people?

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.

> LISTEN TO THEIR ACTUAL PROBLEM ALL THE WAY.

This is the key. People want to be heard, and also people don't necessarily divulge detail in the order you expect. The very last thing that they say may completely invalidate the solution you've been building in your mind as they've been speaking.

Back in the mid 90's I was working support for Windows NT Server. In my area we had our heavy hitters- the issues that came up several times a week- and we all knew them inside out. One day a paying support customer called and within 30 seconds of him starting to talk, I knew exactly what the problem was. I let him talk but after 5 minutes I was getting bored of minesweeper and thought maybe he'd appreciate me fixing his issue. I interrupted him and say, "hey, let's try this". Sure enough, within 2 minutes his issue was fixed. We ended the call politely and I congratulated myself on getting him to relief so quickly.

A couple weeks later we got our support survey results for the month. That customer had been surveyed and was nice enough to write something other than just give a star rating or whatever. I will never forget what he wrote:

"I don't feel like the engineer listened to me before he solved my problem."

That was a lot to unpack at the time- at first I was frustrated because he didn't give me a top score when I knocked it out of the park in my own estimation, but after a lot of reflection I've taken that lesson to heart. That person's short comment made me a better person, certainly better at support but more empathic in general, and I owe them a debt that I can't repay but will pay forward.