Why Coaching, TED Talks, and Podcasts Mostly Fail
Posted on July 01, 2025 by BRYAN FRANCES, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Coaching often fails, even though it usually gives temporary boosts in confidence and self-esteem. What's the secret to making it seriously work?
Any moron can find tons of excellent advice that could significantly improve one’s life. A little research on the web and you’ll be quickly overwhelmed with great suggestions that will genuinely improve your life. Even so, you won’t act on more than a tiny percentage of it. Don’t kid yourself: how much of the advice you’ve read or watched or listened to have you successfully implemented in your life? Not much.
When you took trigonometry in high school, you learned about the sine, cosine, and tangent functions. In order to get even a partial understanding of them, you had to solve many problems that employed those concepts. If you hadn’t done the problems, your mastery would have been nonexistent. The worst thing a teacher hears from a student is “I understand the concepts just fine, I really do! I just can’t do the problems right!” Yeah . . . but no: you don’t understand the concepts. You only have the illusion of comprehension.
Last year I was coaching a super-smart guy, with a high IQ. I sent him an essay of mine to read, since he requested it. After reading it, he said it was pretty elementary so we should move on to the next topic. I asked him a question based on the reading. He got the whole issue horribly wrong, even though the answer was in the reading. It doesn’t matter how sharp you are: if you don’t do the work, you get nowhere.
This has nothing to do with mathematics or philosophy. If you want to gain even a sliver of mastery of just about anything, you have to engage with it in action, whether it’s practice (like learning to play the piano), problem-solving (like in math), story telling (when learning how to write fiction), or something similar. You have to be active, not passive.
Everyone knows this. And yet, we expect to improve our lives by watching TED talks and podcasts, or listening to coaches. Well, that passive learning can be enjoyable and convey some new knowledge. That’s fine. But it’s a pale shadow compared to what you acquire when your learning is active.
Listening to an executive, dating, life, leadership, or … umm … wisdom coach tell you strategies about articulating and then reaching your goals is almost worthless if you aren’t required to do some concrete exercises—and you have to do them right away, under the coach’s direction. If your coach isn’t insisting on a great deal of this, then they are a mere charmer, separating you from your time and money with little return on your investment. And the exercises can’t be something that you don’t get personalized feedback on, such as writing in a journal.
Consider an example, which will initially seem irrelevant but it’s not.
I can say, with confidence, that almost everything you’ve ever heard about quantum mechanics, in various videos and podcasts, is false or dubious. Almost all the wildly confident stuff we hear about uncertainty or indeterminacy or mind-dependence is just silliness. Part of the blame lies in the physicists who peddle this nonsense. The ones who were breaking new ground, a hundred years ago, are blameless, since they were merely flailing about with totally new material they found confusing. Today’s physicists should know better. But I have met many people in my life who are highly intelligent, who have watched plenty of videos or read several articles in the popular press about quantum theory, and take themselves to know important basics of quantum uncertainty, quantum probability, Schrödinger’s cat, and so on.
They don’t. Not even close. Not even “in broad outline” or “roughly put”. If you don’t do the problem solving part of learning about quantum mechanics, you can forget understanding more than 1% of it.
So, again, if you want to hire a coach or something similar, you can settle for tickling your brain in small dopamine hits that don’t cause you to significantly improve your life. It won’t lead to much of anything. Or, you can do something that requires work out of you, similar in difficulty to homework in college, with a real major.
