In what way are they opposing thoughts? Steve Jobs said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. Mark Cuban also said keep putting in the effort until you find the thing that you love. The exact word choice may have differed, but they both expressed the exact same thing.
Perhaps you can interpret Jobs' statement that way in a vacuum, but fortunately we don't need to evaluate what Jobs' said in a vacuum. He has said a lot of other things that allow us to build up context around his intent.
The problem was not that we didn’t know what to do ("eat less"), but to enable that solution.
The real solution to weight loss (especially in the U.S.) is to change the social norms. When everyone is hitting the buffets and going to Cheesecake Factory and buying high calorie garbage at a discount, of course to population gets fat. France, for example, makes all of that much harder. Maybe Ozempic will help reduce the Walmart-wheelchair-fat population, but truly becoming fit as a country requires significantly more friction for everyone.
An interviewer is really asking "how do you recommend people replicate your success?" which grounds the response in the hard lessons that person learned on their own journey.
Personalized advice can be equally useless, but if that person really understands you and your situation you might be surprised how specific and valuable good objective feedback can be.
Or "playing the lute for a cow" (though we know some animals can appreciate music in some way) the point being that advice depends on the listener's capacity to understand the intent of the advisor.
There are things that can work, and things that likely won't work, and most people know these. Then there is a space of things that usually work and things that may not work, and you can't fit these into a person without knowing a lot of variables about them and the environment around them, like what and who they know, their personality, their competence (not just their resume), and many, many other variables. So advice defaults to guessing most of these variables to find some direction.
And I think it boosts advisors' ego, makes advisees feel temporarily better, even motivated, but YMMV by a lot.
This is why the good advisors also change the variables in your favor, like introduce you to their network, coach, etc. And often this costs you something. Like money, equity, whatever.
AIs do not have all the contexts about you thus provide you guidance not fit for you. Advisors are the same, they don't know everything about you thus not all advices fit for you.
You know about yourself the best (given you "reflect") and make trade-offs between what you know, and what you consider benficial to you.
As I always bring up about making tradeoffs in HN in my comments, the article is solid.
The mind is always the biggest battle
But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.
Aurornis•53m ago
This is oddly evident in beginner influencers trying to become gurus on social media. They try to write life advice from a position of superiority, but when you look closely they’re given themselves a little pep talk about how they want to be or what they need to hear. It doesn’t mean the advice is wrong, but you can see through the illusion that you’re hearing sage advice from someone who figured it all out long ago.