Featured image: AI-generated illustration of a supportive conversation, not a photograph of research participants.
The advice you keep collecting
What do you do when you know what you want to change, but still cannot seem to change it? Perhaps you save another helpful article, ask someone more experienced, or look for the explanation that will finally make the next step feel possible.
Sometimes that is exactly the right response. You cannot repair a knowledge gap by pretending it is a confidence problem, and expert guidance can make a difficult task safer and more manageable.
But there is another kind of stuck: you already have several reasonable ideas, yet every new recommendation leaves you feeling like the person who needs fixing. The information keeps arriving; your sense that you can use it does not necessarily grow.
That distinction sits behind an unusual research question. What would happen if people struggling toward a goal were asked to sit on the other side of the conversation?
Not to become instant experts, and not to pretend they had everything solved. Just to consider whether their unfinished experience contained something useful for someone else.
A series of experiments published in 2018 explored that possibility. One involved schoolchildren, an online vocabulary program, and a comparison that makes the familiar advice-seeking routine worth reconsidering.
A different role in the same problem
Researchers Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, Ayelet Fishbach, and Angela Duckworth investigated advice and motivation in a paper called Dear Abby: Should I Give Advice or Receive It? Across the investigation, they studied 2,274 participants.
In the school experiment, one group of middle-school students gave younger students advice about staying motivated. Another group received motivational advice from teachers.
The comparison was not between children who received attention and children who were simply ignored. Both groups participated in an advice-based activity, but they occupied different positions within it.
According to the University of Chicago’s account of the research, the sessions happened weekly over three weeks. Students could also use an online vocabulary program, which recorded the time they spent working.
Over the four weeks after the intervention, students who had given advice spent 38 percent more time studying vocabulary than students who had received advice. That is a specific behavioral result, not just a report that the conversation felt encouraging.
It is also narrower than saying the students became 38 percent better learners. Time in one program is not the same as exam performance, long-term academic achievement, or success in every subject.
Still, the contrast is striking. Children did not have to become flawless students before their own ideas could play a useful role in their motivation.
For anyone accustomed to being the person who is always falling behind, that changes the emotional shape of the question. Instead of asking only what you lack, someone is asking what you have already learned.
The prediction that missed something
The researchers also examined adults struggling with goals such as saving money, controlling their tempers, seeking employment, and losing weight. Across these domains, giving advice was more motivating than receiving expert advice in the comparisons they studied.
Here, the wording matters. Feeling more motivated to seek work is not the same outcome as getting a job, and feeling motivated to save is not evidence that a household’s financial constraints have disappeared.
Those limits do not make motivation irrelevant. They prevent an interesting finding from turning into a promise the research cannot keep.
The participants’ expectations added another layer. People predicted that receiving advice would be more motivating than giving it, even though the experiments pointed in the other direction.
Why might that prediction make sense from the inside? If you are struggling, it is easy to assume the missing ingredient must belong to somebody else: their discipline, their strategy, their certainty.
The researchers identified increased confidence as a mechanism behind the motivating effect of giving advice. The university’s explanation describes how making a recommendation asks people to search their own experience for something that has worked.
That is different from being told to believe in yourself without any reason. You are retrieving evidence, however modest, that you have handled part of this problem before.
Someone who cannot maintain a perfect study routine may still know which room is less distracting. Someone discouraged by a job search may still have learned how to make an application clearer.
These are illustrative examples, not scenes reported from the experiments. Their point is simple: an unfinished goal does not automatically erase every useful thing learned along the way.
Useful does not have to mean finished
The most humane reading of this research is not that struggling people should stop asking for help. It is that receiving help need not become their only available role.
A person can need support and still contribute. They can have expertise about one small obstacle while needing someone else’s expertise about another.
That suggests a modest exercise for an ordinary, low-risk goal. Imagine someone asking how to handle one difficulty you genuinely recognize, and describe what has helped you even a little.
Keep the answer specific and honest. Rather than prescribing a whole new personality, identify one workable adjustment, the circumstances in which it helped, and the limits of what you know.
Then consider whether any part of that recommendation would help you today. This private exercise is an application inspired by the findings, not the same intervention tested with students, and its effects are not guaranteed.
If another person is involved, ask whether they want suggestions first. Being invited to contribute is very different from unloading unsolicited instructions on someone who wanted company or a listening ear.
And keep the boundaries clear: medical, legal, financial, and mental health decisions may require qualified support. Confidence is useful, but it does not make an unsafe recommendation accurate.
A question worth asking each other
There is a quiet difference between asking someone why they have not solved a problem and asking what they have learned while trying. The first can sound like a verdict; the second leaves room for experience that is still developing.
In a family, a classroom, or a supportive friendship, that difference may be worth remembering. People do not become empty containers for guidance just because one part of life is difficult.
None of this removes practical barriers. A person may need money, accessible services, childcare, treatment, rest, or a fair opportunity far more urgently than another exercise in motivation.
But where the barrier really is a faltering belief in one’s ability to act, there may be value in a different kind of invitation. Not another lecture about what successful people do, but a chance to name something you understand.
The hopeful part is not that everybody secretly has all the answers. It is that having some unanswered questions does not mean you have nothing to offer.
What is one small piece of advice you could honestly give someone facing a difficulty you know well? And when you hear yourself say it, is there a part you might be ready to use too?
