You know how you get to Carnegie Hall, don’t you? Practice

I’m a bit of a sucker for self-help books. I picked up Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits as I was exiting high school and tried forcing my friends that “sharpening the saw” was the best thing since sliced bread. While I don’t pick up many of Covey’s modern successors, I consider myself a participant in the game of self-improvement and poke at people and books for advice on improving.

To me, the trickiest part is determining what advice is good.

I’ve come to think that we overlook one category of advice. That is advice that is simultaneously simple and difficult. The skill required to follow the advice once is minimal - but following it consistently is challenging. One relatable example is following through on our commitments - doing what we say we will do. In theory, this is very easy to do - simply stop saying you’ll do things you won’t do! But in reality, we all know how easy it is to create a gap between what we commit to and what we do. Eating healthy and less are straightforward solutions to many health problems, but in that domain, and many others, we discard the obvious for more convoluted alternatives. This category contains excellent advice on commitments, health, and how we treat people around us.

Why do we ignore the simple solutions? Part of the answer may lie in the excuses we get to tell ourselves if we ignore the obvious advice. Simple advice is simple, so my ego is not a huge fan of admitting that the only thing blocking progress is my motivation to follow it. A complicated solution lets me pretend that it’s the answer that is preventing progress, not myself.

I’ve put far more faith in simple advice and the view that many small and simple things done correctly will lead to good outcomes, even on a significant scale. I am also more suspicious of solutions that are too complicated. I suspect we use the complexity as an excuse to discard the advice, and it’d be better to implement a simpler alternative. And maybe soon enough my ego will fess up to the fact that the solutions to most problems have simple solutions.