Whose advice carries weight

A lot of advice online is conflicting. The same question gets answered different ways depending on who you ask.

What I've noticed is that the advice that ended up being useful usually came from people whose path I was already on, or whose path I wanted to be on. Not always the people with the biggest following.

I don't fully know why. Maybe their situation was close enough to mine that what worked for them had a chance of working for me. Maybe I trusted them enough to actually try it. Probably some of both.

The opposite has also been true. Advice from people I respected didn't always work, and looking back, it was usually because their situation was different from mine in ways I hadn't accounted for.

So the filter that's worked for me isn't whether someone is right. It's whether their situation is close enough to mine that their answer has a chance of applying.

People in similar situations can still need different things. But it narrows the field more than going by who sounds the most certain.