Why doesn’t advice work? really hits the nail on the head I feel, and lists most of the common “failure modes” of advice. Obviously go read the article (it’s short!) for the full details, but here is a quick summary:

  1. Maybe your advice is bad. Most is.
  2. Maybe your advice is incomplete without your lived experience. Words don’t convey nearly as much as we like to think they do.
  3. Maybe people ignore your advice because they don’t understand it. Or they don’t want to understand it.
  4. Maybe people can’t follow your advice because they don’t feel like it will work. This is especially true for longer term changes.
  5. Maybe what works for you doesn’t work for others. People are different; sometimes wildly so.
  6. Maybe your advice requires a lot of willpower. Or it’s just hard to follow. For example, everybody knows that working out is good for you, yet… well.
  7. Maybe we get stuck inside our heads. Or we are just too close to the issue emotionally to be able to see clearly about it, even things that to outsiders may be obvious.
  8. Maybe when advice works, we don’t call it “advice”. The word has a PR problem.
  9. Maybe the reason your advice is needed is the same reason people can’t follow it.

The last one is perhaps the biggest one, in my opinion. All too often, the biggest barrier to following the advice is not a lack of knowledge; the solutions are often painfully obvious. We just can’t follow it.

The Hacker News discussion has some very insightful comments. For example, some practical rules on giving advice:

  1. Unsolicited advice is always criticism.
  2. LISTEN TO THEIR ACTUAL PROBLEM ALL THE WAY.
  3. Never tell someone what they should do, tell them what you would do in that situation.
  4. Remember that the purpose of giving advice is just to illuminate options, not to have someone follow what you recommend to the letter.
  5. As the advice giver understand that you could be the one who is wrong.

It’s never about trying to convince someone to do what you want, it’s about showing them an option and letting them decide.

I also think that this comment is right about the limitations of approaching such a question purely intellectually, whereas humans are deeply emotional creatures:

It sounds like the author is coming from a places of intellect and might be missing more of the emotional reasons people don’t follow advice.

Intellectual-emotional dissonance is one of the biggest reasons people don’t do things they know they should[1] be doing. We often have the mistaken approach that if we pile on more intellectual reasons why we should take the advice that the logic will outweigh our emotions and we will take the advice. But this isn’t true at all.

Piling on more intellectual reasons creates a bigger gap between emotions and reason making the situation feel even more distressing. It’s usually much more effective to find a way to help people’s emotional sides keep up with their intellect, but we often devalue emotions so much that we even devalue approaching them at all even if it’s to ameliorate them.