The critique of quick tips content isn't wrong. Real transformation doesn't come from a tip you watched on YouTube. It comes from consistent effort over time, from behavior that becomes habit, from habit that becomes part of who you are. A ten-minute video isn't going to do that for you.
So why am I making them anyway?
I think most people don't put a lot of conscious thought into how they take in quick tips content.
The typical pattern: you come across something useful, you write it down, it joins the pile of other things you've decided might be useful someday. Then the moment arrives where it would actually help, and you react on instinct. Same as always. The tip never had a chance.
Part of that is how tips are packaged. When someone distills their experience into a short piece of advice, they're necessarily stripping out the specifics — their situation, their personality, the relationships they were navigating. You get the conclusion without the conditions. Which means it may fit you well, or it may fit you poorly, and there's only one way to find out.
Find out.
Not try the tip. Not commit to the tip. Find out whether the tip is worth your effort — by treating it like an experiment rather than an instruction.
In a new video this week, I walk through what that actually looks like: why testing is different from trying, what the research on learning and self-efficacy tells us about why small wins matter more than they seem, and a personal story about an exercise routine tip that failed and what I learned from its failure.
I also lay out a simple three-step process for interrogating any tip before you add it to the pile, designing a small series of experiments around it, and evaluating what you found.
The short version: a tip that fails isn't evidence that you can't change. It's a finding. It tells you something about your context and your working style that the tip, as packaged, couldn't have told you. That information is the starting point for something that actually sticks.
If you're going to watch quick tips content — my upcoming series or anyone else's — I'd encourage you to watch this video first.