This is an extension of a comment I made that I can't find and also a request for examples. It seems plausible that, when giving advice, many people optimize for deepness or punchiness of the advice rather than for actual practical value. There may be good reasons to do this - e.g. advice that sounds deep or punchy might be more likely to be listened to - but as a corollary, there could be valuable advice that people generally don't give because it doesn't sound deep or punchy. Let's call this boring advice.
An example that's been discussed on LW several times is "make checklists." Checklists are great. We should totally make checklists. But "make checklists" is not a deep or punchy thing to say. Other examples include "google things" and "exercise."
I would like people to use this thread to post other examples of boring advice. If you can, provide evidence and/or a plausible argument that your boring advice actually is useful, but I would prefer that you err on the side of boring but not necessarily useful in the name of more thoroughly searching a plausibly under-searched part of advicespace.
Upvotes on advice posted in this thread should be based on your estimate of the usefulness of the advice; in particular, please do not vote up advice just because it sounds deep or punchy.
Read literature with an old writing style, especially if you dislike said writing style. The more opaque and complicated, the better.
I find that I'm a very fidgety reader, unconsciously skipping words, or even whole sentences, skimming over words I don't actually know the meaning of, and failing to connect the context of words that I do know the meaning of with the rest of the narrative or lecture. This I do with both literature and more importantly, when reading science. I've decided to read At The Mountains of Madness and penalize myself for every time I lose track of the narrative, and reward myself for every time I recognize when one sentence adds or contributes to something implied by another sentence earlier on in the paragraph, and so on. Furthermore, I will do this for only literature, and not with learning new scientific concepts, or even old ones that I have already learned. The problem is with reading comprehension, not with understanding concepts, and exercising two skills at once prematurely may cause problems. I hope this will instill genuine patience, so that being careful and observant becomes a natural thing, rather than the uncomfortable thing I wrestle with.
Proust's In Search of Lost Time, with its famously long and complicated sentences that often take four or five reads to parse, is great for this. As a bonus, it's Great.