Advice on advice

The problem with advice is that the sender and receiver have different internal representations. The receiver understands the words but not the way the sender does. The sender usually doesn't know this. Most of it is tacit knowledge.

Most advice is autobiographical—it's distilled from lived experience. Transferring that entire experience with language alone is nearly impossible. Good advice only feels profound after you've lived it yourself.

Take a simple example: someone tells you to work hard. You nod. You already work hard. You think you understand.

Then you meet someone who actually works hard. The gap is enormous. They're not doing something you don't know about. They're doing what you know, but more, much more. The difference is in the execution, not the instruction. You knew the advice all along.

This is why good advice should pass the "could the opposite also be a good idea?" test. If the opposite is clearly terrible, it's just a truism, something everyone already knows intellectually. The real test is whether you've internalized it through experience.

The advice isn't the bottleneck; experience is.