When engaging in something difficult, to be successful you need to be skilled, and you need to make good decisions. For help, you turn to people who are successful, ie. they are skilled and they make good decisions. They give you advice. You employ advice, but you fail nevertheless. Why?

Advice helps with decision making, only. Advice giver, more often than not, assumes skill is already present when giving advice. If that assumption is not met, advice fails. Fortunately, to be successful doesn’t always require you to be very skillful. It requires, though, to recognize that your way of achieving the goal will not be the same as for those who are skillful, and so their advice will not apply to you.

Example: 1968 Olympics high jump competition. The winner was an athlete Dick Fosbury. Few years earlier, in second year of high school, he couldn’t even qualify for a high school track meet. He decided that, instead of trying to become more skilled in the then-dominant “straddle” technique, he would experiment with his jumps, trying to find something that would fit him better. His attempts were described at the time as an “airborne seizure”. His coaches would tell him to continue practicing the “straddle”, the advice that he didn’t listen to. Only in college, after breaking the school record, would his new coach start encouraging him in practicing his novel technique, which finally resulted in a gold medal.