Why success advice doesn't always work

If you're like me, when someone asks you a question, in most cases the answer will be "it depends" mainly because there are multiple answers to a question and each of them depends on certain situations.

However, when it comes to success advice, people seem to forget that and they just take the advice they get as being applicable no matter what you do.

"Wake up early in the morning, work hard, make a list, drink coffee, sleep better, produce more content, produce high quality content, do this and do that".

While I don't deny that receiving advice about how to succeed is a good thing and it can motivate you to do a lot even when you can't really think of a reason to do so, in a lot of situations that advice can be harmful if it's applied by people who do things that require them to work in a certain way.

For example, let's say you're an artist who loves to draw and wants to achieve success.

Now, if you listen to all the advice I talked about above, waking up early in the morning, working hard and creating content often may not be that good of an advice for what you want to do.

If you want to draw amazing things that will surprise people and will make them want to buy your work, then publishing often and working for 12 hours a day without even thinking about inspiration and getting ideas may actually harm your workflow.

You can lose all your motivation and produce low quality content because you force yourself to do too much in too little time. If you want to work on amazing things, then creating something and sharing it every day won't always be a good idea.

You'll need a lot of time and not worrying about publishing often may be what will actually help you.

This applies to different goal as well - if you want to sketch a lot and publish often, then taking your time when it comes to your work and spending days or even weeks on the same sketch may demotivate you and make you wanna give up.

Advice is useful when it can help you achieve something you want. However, applying a certain type of advice on an activity that requires you to do the exact opposite may transform that advice into an obstacle and even slow down your progress towards success.

So what can you do in a situation like this?

Learn what type of advice is best for how you work and what type of content you produce, and stop listening to everything people have to say. These days information made everyone believe they can give advice no matter how little experience they have in a certain field.

You'll see people who never worked on drawing anything their entire life trying to tell you how to achieve success as an artist and what you should be doing every day in order to make more progress.

Try to figure out what you need to do depending on the type of content you create and your workflow, and if you can, ask people who work in the same field as you for advice.

You'll be surprised how many of them are willing to give you advice for free, and if you can receive some tips from someone who does what you do but is at a completely different level, then you may be able to make a lot of progress in a really short amount of time, because you'll be able to be a lot more productive and focus on what you need to be doing instead of trying a bunch of things and failing until you figure out what works and what doesn't.