A good recipe is useless to a terrible cook. Similarly, a set of instructions is meaningless if it's in a foreign language. How-to-guides are great, but only in the right context. People spend so much time searching for meaning, fulfillment, happiness, etc. There's no shortage of information or advice out there. Though, the more I think about it, the more I feel that we (the individual) must derive and define this context ourselves.

I could read a thousand recipes but it won't make me a better cook until I get in the kitchen and start burning stuff. Thus, fantasizing about other people's "ideal lives" and trying to reverse engineer their success by following in similar footsteps is asking for inevitable disappointment. My cake will never come out exactly the same as the picture and that's okay, because the one in the picture isn't the one I'm eating. Life is our own personal journey to travel, recipe to bake, and story to tell. Friendly advice is always welcome, but it's my cake and I'm the chef.