Good Advice, Rarely Followed

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the merits of basic good advice. Simple things like: get more sleep, spend less than you earn, call your parents, move your body, put down your phone, save for the long term, pay attention. They’re not great mysteries. They’re not hidden in secret textbooks or locked away by elite institutions. Instead, they’re more likely printed on refrigerator magnets, woven into cliché hand towels, and delivered ad nauseum in commencement speeches year after year. 

And yet. Most of us nod, silently agree—and then just carry on living as if the advice were meant for someone else. Why?

Part of the problem is that common sense doesn’t feel profound or urgent. There’s no penalty for ignoring that thing today. Skip a workout, you’re fine. Spend too much on dinner, life goes on. Distract yourself for an evening, and nothing tangibly breaks. Instead the consequences arrive silently, compound quietly, and only years later do we discover we’ve traded intention for complacency, resilience for fragility, and depth for distraction.

But there’s also a deeper and more obvious resistance to practical advice. It’s usually not fun. To follow it is to decline the pleasures of the immediate for some promise land of the distant. That’s particularly hard in a culture that’s been engineered to monetize distraction and celebrate indulgence. Doing the obvious thing—closing the laptop, walking outside, initating the difficult conversation—requires a stubborn act of imagination: believing that your future self is as real and deserving as your present cravings.

The point of failure isn’t the lack of knowledge. We fail for lack of seriousness. As author and entrepreneur, Derek Sivers so eloquently once said, “if information were the answer, we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” To live by what we already know would mean admitting that discipline, not brilliance, is what separates flourishing from drift. It’d mean taking responsibility for our outcomes and accepting that we’re vulnerable, impulsive, and emotional humans after all. 

The irony is that the good advice remains free, simple, unchanged, and waiting. The same truths passed down for generations, the same lessons printed into every self-help book on the shelf. If you actually follow them, you become unusual, even extraordinary—not because you discovered something new, but because you finally acted on what everyone else keeps pushing off for tomorrow.

The rarest kind of wisdom isn’t novel insight. It’s old insight, practiced. Good advice isn’t hard to find, it’s just rarely followed.