Everyone knows what others should do
Advice for other people is cheap and abundant. Knowing what you yourself are supposed to do is rarer and more load-bearing.
Everyone knows what others are supposed to do. Very few know what they themselves are supposed to do. Public conversation is full of prescriptions for governments, schools, companies, and strangers. The scarcer act is naming your own next concrete duty and carrying it without an audience.
I try to keep that asymmetry in view. Clarity about other people’s failures is not the same as seriousness about one’s own work.
From X
Derived from posts on X as devendrasm: