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, 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 an example: someone tells you to work hard. You nod because you already work hard and think you understand.

Then you meet someone who actually works hard and the gap is enormous. They're answering emails at 6am, shipping code at midnight, and somehow still reading papers on the weekend. They're not doing something you don't know about. They're doing what you know, but more, much more.

Specificity helps. Instead of "work hard," say "I wake up at 5am, work focused blocks until 10pm, and haven't taken a weekend off in three months."

Another heuristic is whether advice passes the "could the opposite also be a good idea?" question. If you try to achieve something, then "work harding" is obviously better than not working hard so there is limited information gain. "Move fast" is better, plenty of successful people argue for moving slow and getting it right. If the opposite is clearly terrible, it's a truism; something everyone already knows.

Advice works best when the receiver is already almost there, when they've built enough context that the words finally click into place. The gap between your experience and theirs has to be small enough for language to bridge.

Of course, this essay is also advice. You'll nod, maybe agree, and probably forget. Until someday you give advice that doesn't land, and suddenly you'll understand what I mean.