We are inundated with gurus and experts dishing advice on how to live a perfect life. The last thing you want to do is beat yourself up after reading an AI generated “life-hack” from these pseudo-experts.

Even when implementing advice coming from solid research, there are still limitations and caveats that don’t get as much airtime. On that note, “backed by science” is now officially recommended in marketing courses to increase clicks.

Yes, there are proven best practices, but all models suffer from abstraction, and are sterile — they are removed from the nuances of our unique situations. When gurus pontificate, they leave out key assumptions, nuances, and complexities of applying their model to our own special mess.

👉The key is to recognize that this is NOT our flaw, but rather a flaw of the MODEL.

I see this pattern all too often in clients who read a leadership classic (insert your genre) and have cognitive dissonance when they go back to the “real world” of work. The mistake is trying to follow the advice verbatim, instead of the upstream principles behind them.

Consider my own experience at following some of these prescriptions:

• Meditation: I fall asleep when trying to meditate, but I’m in a meditative mode during running, swimming, and writing.

• Journals: Gratitude journalling just doesn’t work for me. The process breaks down the moment I want something out of it. What works is spontaneously noticing and writing.

• Reading: I don’t finish most books, but go through close to a 100/year. I just read the parts that interest me and move on. The filtering criteria is curiosity and interest rather than someone’s recommendation, or because someone said I had to. As Haruki Murakami said, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

• Organization/Discipline: I’m disorganized and undisciplined in many things, but equally so in a few important ones. My systems are built to make up for that lack of discipline. Daily planning doesn’t work for me. Weekly/quarterly plans work better.

• Networking: I’m an introvert, but I connect through meaningful 1-on-1 conversations.

• Time