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 also said a lot of other things that allow us to build up context around his intent. He spoke a lot about how he found his love.
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 fiddle 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.
- It's contextual to the advice giver: Is it specific to them? Do they have an ulterior motive or are beholden to someone with an ulterior motive, e.g. getting you to support their agenda or getting you to buy or vote.
- It's contextual to you: Does that fit the way you operate? Does it play to your strengths?
- And it's contextual to your ...well... context: Are you in a country where this advice applies? Do you have the financial means to execute on it, etc...
Bottom line - there are very few pieces of truly universal good advice.
What do you think such advice could be/is and the definition of finding such advice and to differentiating it from other advice which is still contextual?
The advice is: Work very hard on something, and you too might get lucky.
Jobs' version is just slightly modified: Work very hard on something (you care about), and you too might get lucky.
The issue there, is that for every "successful" person, there are thousads who did the exact same things and didn't make it. Arguably a better thing would be to interview the ones who failed, and learn lessons from them.
Secondly, the person themselves can be selective in what they share, they may talk about the risks they took to get where they are, but not about the backstop of a wealthy family to fall back on if it all goes wrong (for example).
It may not be right for you, but you'll have made a better decision for having considered it.
The mind is always the biggest battle
But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.
And as a bonus, now they also have one. A lot of people didn't even believe that was the solution though, and the belief change is important.
Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.
Exercising is great, absolutely, but eating less is the actual primary method. While acknowledging complications of metabolism and psychology and weird states body goes through when it's hungry, primary part is to reduce calory intake vs expenditure.
So as snide and silly as it may be, in my neck of the woods, I would agree, lots of people don't believe eating less is the primary method of losing weight.
A bag of doritos is 200+ calories. The exercise involved to burn that off is running or walking multiple miles. It’s way easier in terms of physical expenditure to just not eat the doritos, or skip the sugary soda.
Discussion about it in news, conversations would get it mixed up into stories of genetics, free will, macronutrient balance, personal identities, culture etc. Call it nuance; complexity, or bullshit. But people had a hard time accepting the "eat less to not be fat".
Perhaps even more notable is this is one of the things you actually can change about your body, appearance and health outcomes! There are so many things that are immutable. And people would try to convince you the biggest mutable thing is also out of reach.
I mean, we've been telling people "eat less" for literally decades and Americans are fatter than ever. The only thing that finally brought down societal-wide obesity stats was GLP-1s.
Aurornis•1h 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.