Advice Gets Good When It Gets Specific

In my experience, breakthroughs happen when the advice gets specific. “Seize the day” is good advice, in the sense that it contains a powerful truth about living well. But it’s not nearly as useful as, “Do something that intimidates you before noon,” or “Never put something off a third time, if you plan to ever do it.”

The advice has no value until it is parsed into specific know-how that applies in certain kinds of moments. Once it is, it begins to transform the person.

When you start taking these more specific actions, the power of present-focused living starts to reveal itself. When these revelations happen to you, they feel fresh and concrete—the opposite of what you’d expect from an abstract, familiar phrase like “Live in the present.”

It might seem like you need some wiser person to tell you what the specific advice is, but not really. Say the idea of carpe diem resonates with you. You can ask yourself, “How would I ‘seize the day’ on this sleepy Tuesday afternoon in my office?” and a more specific principle might occur to you:Attempt difficult tasks at times when you want to do... See more

This principle extends to clichéd advice particular to certain activities. In chess, the classic beginner advice is “Develop your pieces,” which means to get all your pieces to better squares than the ones they start on. I had this phrase in my mind for years, but it didn’t really improve my chess games until someone gave me a more specific version... See more

Notice that these more specific expressions of classic life advice all refer to concrete objects and things. They identify a real-life moment where the wisdom would make a difference, and they tell you how to create that difference.

Without a specific application point, a piece of classic wisdom is just a platitude.