Personal Growth Advice Is Optimized to Be Shareable. Shareable and Accurate Solve for Different Things.
Personal growth advice, produced for a wide audience, is under constant pressure to be shareable — quotable, broadly applicable, resonant with as many people as possible in as few words as possible. Shareability and accuracy are solving for different, frequently conflicting goals, and content optimized for the first routinely sacrifices the second.
Advice that's accurate for one specific person's specific situation is usually too particular to be widely shareable — it depends on details that don't generalize, which makes it useless as viral content but potentially very useful for the one person it actually fits. Advice general enough to resonate broadly has to sand off exactly the specificity that would make it accurate for any one person's real situation.
This tension explains why so much widely shared, well-liked personal growth content produces so little actual change: it was optimized for resonance, not for fit, and resonance is a measure of how many people nod along, not how precisely the advice matches any individual reader's actual pattern.
Shareable and accurate aren't the same goal wearing different clothes. They're different goals, and content built to maximize one has, almost by necessity, given up some ground on the other.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai