当建议变得具体时，它就会变得很好

I’ve never had great penmanship, but one day in grade four it went from atrocious to merely eccentric after receiving a single piece of advice from my father.

我的钢笔字从来都不是很好，但在四年级的一天，在接受了父亲的一个建议后，我的钢笔字从糟糕变成了仅仅是古怪的。

I had already received frequent advice on the matter from my teachers. Pay attention to what you’re doing. Don’t get frustrated, just make each one a little better. Practice, practice, practice.

我已经从我的老师那里经常收到关于这个问题的建议。注意你在做什么。不要感到沮丧，只要让每一个人都做得更好一点。练习，练习，练习。

My dad’s advice was much more specific: try to make the bottom of each letter touch the blue line.

我父亲的建议要具体得多：尽量让每个字母的底部接触蓝线。

This made for an immediate improvement, because it made it clear what to do differently—get the loop of the “b” and the trunk of the “t” to meet the cyan lines, rather than float somewhere above them.

这使我们立即有了改进，因为它明确了要做的不同工作--让 "b "的环和 "t "的主干与青色线条相接，而不是浮在它们上面。

The advice of my teachers was still valid, despite being all clichés. You probably can get good at almost anything by doing it repeatedly and paying close attention, while trying to improve on each repetition. That’s probably how Larry Bird got good at basketball.

我的老师的建议仍然有效，尽管都是陈词滥调。你也许可以通过反复做并密切关注，同时努力在每次重复中改进，从而在几乎任何事情上取得好成绩。这可能就是拉里-伯德如何在篮球方面取得好成绩的。

In fact, some of the best advice comes in the form of clichés. Be yourself. Seize the day. Fake it till you make it. Despite how trite these phrases sound now, they are still deep, paradigm-shifting insights about being human. They’ve undoubtedly changed countless lives, which is how they became trite. Precisely because these principles have been discovered and expressed many times, in many contexts, they’ve become too general and too familiar to revolutionize how someone does something.

事实上，一些最好的建议是以陈词滥调的形式出现的。做你自己。抓紧时间。假装，直到你成功。尽管这些短语现在听起来很老套，但它们仍然是关于做人的深刻的、转变范式的见解。它们无疑已经改变了无数人的生活，这就是它们变得老套的原因。正因为这些原则已经被发现和表达了很多次，在很多情况下，它们已经变得太笼统，太熟悉，无法彻底改变某人的做事方式。

In my experience, breakthroughs happen when the advice gets specific. “Seize the day” is good advice, in the sense that it contains a powerful truth about living well. But i...