My kid has recently decided he's into meteorology. First, he just walked around with scribblings of "+5, -11" and hummed a weather forecast theme. This got boring for everybody else, so we explained to him that 'weather' happens in some places, and people watch it for explicit purposes of deciding some matters, not for sheer cuteness. (I don't think he believed me on that one.)
So now we make 'forecasts' - several for Ukraine (first the video, then the sound, for 25 cities or for north-south-center-west-east), Earth ('Australiaaa... thirty-six degrees... kangoroo can live'), and space in general (with fictional planets, although he ordered a Solar system, too). The upcoming one is going to be for mammoths (I'm thinking Eurasia + North America).
This lets us work on reading, writing, reciting (short messages; he doesn't like learning poetry by heart), painting and building things from cardboard, finding places on the globe. Although my husband groans about having to edit the end product (without delay).
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.