Why advice from successful people doesn't work for you

Do what you love. Work with discipline. Start by picking up the trash around you. These are bits of advice from successful people. We try to follow them, hoping to succeed ourselves, but more often than not, it doesn't work. Then we blame ourselves: "This is why I never make it."

But after jumping into the startup world, I realized two things. First, the advice itself might be wrong. Second, all advice might boil down to just two things. Let me explain both.

#Advice they don't follow themselves

Sometimes the advice is something even the advisor doesn't actually do.

Most advice comes from newspaper interviews or autobiographies. There is the obvious problem of things getting lost or distorted when spoken words become written text. But the bigger issue is what questions were asked.

Questions like "What was the most important thing for achieving X?" put the interviewee's brain under pressure. Instead of drawing from real experience, they start making up plausible-sounding answers. They end up giving "advice" about things they never actually did, and that advice gets published in bestsellers and floats around the internet for decades.

WTF

So now, whenever I encounter advice, I try to find what question prompted it and how it connects to the person's actual experience. If I can't figure that out, I just let it go.

#We only see the surface

The other problem is that we only look at the surface of advice.

Advice is supposed to be a method or mindset that helps you reach a goal. That means advice only works within a specific context. If the context is missing or the advice is too generic, it is unlikely to help. "Make a mandala chart" or "make your bed every morning" are just superficial behaviors.

Shohei Ohtani's mandala chart

Once you think about context, it becomes obvious why successful people's advice doesn't work for you. Advice carries context, and context includes the person's personality, mindset, the era they lived in, social circumstances, luck, and other incidentals. Replicating someone else's context is impossible in a complex world.

So is advice useless? Some people did succeed by following advice from successful people. And aren't there common themes across all this advice?

Yes. There is no way to copy someone's advice and get the same result. But there is something common in what they all pursued to reach their goals: a driving force. Specifically, speed and persistence.

Advice about success almost always points to these two things. With speed, you can go through more trial and error in the same amount of time and learn faster than others. With persistence, you stay steady through competition, and sometimes you can simply outlast your competitors.

#How to build speed and persistence

You can reference advice from successful people. But don't let it control you.

If you really want to achieve what you want, think about how to build your speed and persistence. Ask yourself what kind of person you are and how badly you want it. If you have ADHD, maybe doing what you find fun and exciting is the right path. If you are not sure about much but feel desperate enough, maybe commit to five years of doing just one thing.

What kind of person are you, and what advice will you create for yourself?