If you give advice you don’t follow, you’re not wise. You’re just well-read.

Knowing the right answer and being able to act on it are separate achievements, and only the second one is hard. Advice is cheap to produce because it costs nothing to say what someone else should do, which is why there is so much of it around. The gap between what you recommend and what you do is where the real difficulty lives.

Take the thing you most often tell other people and do it yourself this week, once, properly. You will probably discover why they struggle, and your advice gets both more useful and considerably more modest.