An old man had had a good life and stayed in strong health into life’s twilight. Every day he would take his golden retriever for a walk in the afternoon, then have a Del Monte fruit cup sitting on his porch.
One day his grandson asked him the secret to a long life, and the old man told him “the most important things are to own a purebred dog, to walk him at exactly 3 pm every day, and to have a name brand snack after your walk.”
The moral here is sometimes people are successful and, despite their best intentions, unable to convey to others the path to the success they’ve enjoyed. I encountered the above parable years ago on a personal finance site. The author used it to make the point that many investing strategies, including those with devoted adherents, are nonsense. BUT the people who follow them are sometimes unintentionally tracking a worthwhile path.
Dividend investors are fooling themselves. In spite of their delusions, saving regularly, putting money into dividend stocks, and reinvesting the returns leads to a much better outcome than not investing. Even if it underperforms broad market index funds.
I regularly get irritated by writing advice. Some of it is so self-evidently wrong, that I’m suspicious the person giving the advice is trying to mislead people. As they say, “never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” A far more likely explanation is that the people giving the advice have stumbled upon success and are unable to understand, let alone explain and teach, how they did it.
I’ve written about writers being careful taking advice in the past, but I think it’s a worthwhile message to re-iterate.
In “So Good They Can’t Ignore You“, Cal Newport makes the claim that people giving advice will substitute suggestions that make them look good in place of their actual experience. Hearing Steve Jobs say the path to success is following your passion is more pleasing than hearing him say he succeeded because he’s smarter and harder working than you are. Or that he attached himself to a talented engineer and traded that engineer’s abilities to create his legacy.
In Scott Adams’ “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” he talks about the huge role luck has had in his success and feels any successful person who doesn’t acknowledge that they’re lucky is being disingenuous.
All of this is to say, no one can give you a guaranteed map leading to success as a writer (or anything else). Successful writers might encourage you to do things that are a waste of time or harmful. The path that you’re currently struggling with might be the right way forward if you persevere.
The uncertainty of the endeavor makes it hard to evaluate progress.
related: non-parents giving parenting advice. They have a faulty memory of being children but no experience to understand why their parents did the things they did. The slate advice columns are full of this.
I had a co-worker politely make this point to me when I was offering an (uninformed) opinion on parenting 25 years ago. She said, “everyone is an expert on parenting until they have kids”. I learned my lesson and haven’t done this since.