META: There is a good reason to assume that an punchy-sounding piece of advice will be more useful than a boring-sounding piece of advice: all other things being equal, the listener is usually more likely to have already heard the latter than the former. (Of course, “more likely” != “sure”, and also people often do forget advice they've already heard, so it's not like boring advice is always useful; but the tone of this post appears to imply that punchyness and usefulness are not in fact positively correlated.)
Wait, people are more likely to have heard boring advice than punchy advice? Why do you say that? I would have assumed the opposite (punchy advice is more interesting and therefore more likely to be repeated).
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.