EDIT: I just now realized that your comment above is a great example of the sort of follow-up questions I'm talking about. Well played.
Examples from the past week:
As you can see, this is at best an imperfect tool for getting a specific type of story. The core of the technique is that I don't have anything in mind when I start, and I'm not steering towards any particular topic.
I haven't tried to get stories like the ones you're looking for, but I've found that being direct is usually a good approach. Maybe just go with "so who are the important people in your life?"
Maybe just go with "so who are the important people in your life?"
I really like that. It gives you a good sense of how they relate to people and also how probably what they value, assuming they give any indication at all of why those people are important.
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.