As someone who writes a lot of personal development style articles and tries to help people change for a living (psychotherapy), I ask myself this question almost constantly:

What’s the true active ingredient in a given “intervention”? And is it even in the intervention or simply the result of some internal factor in the person?

My takeaway from your piece here is that it’s hard to ever know, so maybe the best we can do is be humble about it (as dispensers of advice) and skeptical (as consumers of it).

Still, I think there are some attributes that are more predictive of success, regardless of the person receiving it:

• Developmental Timing. Being aware of where someone is developmentally and timing an intervention to hit at the right moment. Hard to do in writing, but in therapy or coaching, this often means “sitting on” an intervention you love because you can see someone isn’t quite ready to optimally receive it (and that it could even backfire if delieverd too early).
• Rigorous Empathy. Understanding the person aspiring to change in a nuanced and holistic way. Major change often fails because there are obstacles that a person has to the change on some level but isn’t really aware of. The best interventions/advice in the world aren’t going to work if those major obstacles (which often take the form of motivation toward an incompatible goal) aren’t fleshed out and addressed. And of course, to do all this, you have to really understand the person trying to make the change.
• Self-Efficacy. How past experience making significant positive change does a person have, especially domain-specific change? Usually not tons. This is where an incrementalist approach to change is so helpful. James Clear, address this well, I thin with his focus on tiny habits and 1% change. Major change often reuires a belife that we can change. And that belief usually has to come from our own experience.

Just some thoughts. But as someone who gives a lot of what basically boils down to self-help advice, I know I need to be better about asking myself whether my advice is actually build on some reasonably solid principles or is jsut drifting into shallow “this worked for me” stuff.

Thanks for the, as usualy, thought-provoking stuff, Charles!