The Relevance Gap
The formula that governs product value also governs whether advice ever moves anyone. Part two of two
Last week I wrote about something I have watched happen across decades of consulting, leading, and being led. Correct advice, from a trusted friend or a paid firm, arrives clearly, gets agreed with, and then quietly disappears into a folder or a forgotten conversation. The advice was almost never the problem. The listener was.
I introduced a formula I use in my own business thinking.
Value ∝ (Existing Demand × Relevance) / Friction
And I argued that crisis is the only reliable trigger for action because it is the only thing that moves all three variables simultaneously. Urgency spikes. Identity resistance collapses. Even mediocre advice becomes a lever. Everything short of crisis tends to produce agreement without motion.
But that raised a question I did not fully answer. Why does the same advice land so differently depending on who is receiving it, and when? A twenty-three-year-old can reach a seventeen-year-old with five minutes of honest conversation in ways a forty-five-year-old cannot manage in years. A founder who nearly went under three years ago gets heard in a boardroom differently than a partner who has studied the same pattern across a hundred engagements. The advice can be word for word identical. Something else is doing the work.
The answer is that existing demand multiplied by relevance is not a fixed property of the advice. It changes depending on where the listener is standing in time.
Hyperbolic Discounting
The brain does not treat future consequences evenly. It applies what behavioral economists call hyperbolic discounting, where how much you believe a future consequence will actually affect you drops sharply the further away it is. The function is:
How much a future consequence moves you = 1 / (1 + (fade rate × delay))
Read this as: how much a future consequence moves you shrinks as the delay grows, scaled by your personal fade rate. What is fade rate? It is the speed at which a future consequence loses its grip on you the further away it sits. Think of it like a photograph left in the sun. The image was real when it was taken. Leave it long enough and the colors wash out until you can barely make out what it showed. A high fade rate means your future washes out fast. A low fade rate means you can hold a consequence ten years away and still feel its weight today. Someone buying cigarettes at sixteen is not ignorant of lung disease. They simply have a fade rate steep enough that forty years from now registers as nearly indistinguishable from never.
Adolescents show significantly higher fade rates than adults across dozens of studies. The prefrontal cortex, which regulates this, is one of the last brain regions to fully develop, finishing somewhere in the mid-twenties. A sixteen-year-old is not making bad decisions because they lack information. They are making decisions with hardware that genuinely cannot hold the weight of a distant consequence the way an adult brain can. When a parent says this will affect you in ten years, the teenage brain applies its fade rate to that timeline and arrives at something close to nothing. The advice is not wrong. The future it points to simply does not register as real enough to compete with what is available right now.
Takeaway: The first reason teenagers do not act on adult advice is not attitude. It is arithmetic. The future being warned about genuinely weighs almost nothing in how their brain is currently doing the math.
Even if you compressed the timeline, something else would still be working against the advice.
In 1967, psychologist David Elkind described what he called the personal fable, the adolescent tendency to believe in their own uniqueness and invulnerability. Not arrogance exactly. More like a cognitive feature of that particular stage of development. Because teenagers become intensely aware of themselves as the center of their own experience, they arrive at a parallel belief: that their experience is categorically different from everyone else’s. Consequences that befell other people are therefore not predictions about what will happen to them. They are things that happen to a different kind of person.
This is why the cautionary story so often lands as interesting but inapplicable. The teenager is not disputing the facts. They are sorting themselves into a different category than the one the story describes. The parent had that experience. The parent is someone else. The lesson may be true in general, but it does not reach me specifically.
I see the same thing in executive teams. “The companies in the case study failed. We are different. Our position is distinct. The lesson is noted.”
Elkind’s personal fable and the corporate identity protection I described last week are the same thing running at different ages. Both collapse the relevance side of the formula, how applicable the consequence feels to this specific listener, regardless of how well-argued or credible the advice is.
The future self, to the brain…
There is a third thing underneath both of those, and it may be the most important one.
Hal Hershfield at Stanford ran a series of fMRI studies asking people to think about their current selves, their future selves ten years ahead, and strangers they recognized but did not know personally. When people thought about their present selves, the brain regions associated with self-referential thinking lit up. When those same people thought about their future selves, the brain activity looked almost identical to what appeared when they were thinking about the strangers.
The future self, to the brain, is not experienced as a continuous version of who you are now. It is experienced as someone else.
Hershfield also found that people who showed the largest gap between their present-self and future-self brain activation were the most impatient in financial decisions, the most willing to sacrifice future benefit for immediate reward. The disconnect is not a metaphor. It is measurable, and it predicts behavior.
Adolescents show the weakest future-self continuity of any age group. For a teenager, the version of themselves at forty-five is not just distant in time. It is genuinely processed, at the neural level, as a different person. When an adult gives advice rooted in their own experience, they are describing, from the teenager’s vantage point, what happened to someone the teenager does not yet recognize as themselves.
This is the part of the advice problem that the formula captures and that the standard literature on advice-giving misses. The problem is not only that the future consequence barely registers, or that the teenager believes they are immune. It is that the advisor has completed a transformation the listener cannot yet navigate toward.
The adult stands at a point the teenager cannot project themselves to, because the route between here and there is not yet imaginable. A destination you cannot simulate does not function as a warning.
Takeaway: Advice from an adult to a teenager fails not because the advice is wrong. It fails because the listener experiences the advisor’s future as belonging to a stranger. The further the advisor is from the listener in time and life stage, the less any of it lands as personally real.
This is where the formula stops being a diagnosis and becomes something you can actually use.
Value ∝ (Existing Demand × Relevance) / Friction
The probability of acting on advice rises when existing demand is high and the advice connects to something the listener already feels the pull of, and falls when the friction of receiving and acting on it is high. You cannot easily lower someone’s fade rate through argument. You cannot talk a teenager out of the personal fable by explaining it to them. What you can change is who delivers the advice, and the conditions under which it arrives.
A twenty-three-year-old telling a seventeen-year-old about a decision that cost them two years ago is heard differently than a forty-five-year-old saying the same thing. Not because the twenty-three-year-old has more credibility in any formal sense. Because the gap is small enough to be traversable in the listener’s imagination. The seventeen-year-old can see themselves becoming that person. The route is visible. The consequence connects to a future self that still feels like a self rather than a stranger. Existing demand times relevance goes up, and at the same time friction goes down, because there is no submission involved in listening to someone barely older than you. There is identification.
Near-peer mentorship works not because the near-peer knows more. They usually know less. It works because their advice arrives at a higher numerator and a lower denominator.
The same logic applies at the organizational level. A consultant who recently operated in the position they are advising from lands differently than one whose expertise is purely analytical. A founder who nearly ran out of cash three years ago and is now advising a company at the same stage will be heard differently than a partner who has studied the pattern across a hundred engagements. The pattern-studier may have the broader view. But the person who recently lived through it is closer to where the listener currently stands in their own mind.
Takeaway: The person best positioned to change your mind is rarely the most qualified person in the room. It is the person whose transformation you can still see yourself making.
Making the future self more imaginable
Most advice-givers optimize for correctness. They sharpen the argument, build the case, improve the evidence, and assume that if the logic is sound enough, the listener will follow. The formula says the logic is rarely the constraint. What constrains action is whether the listener can see the consequence as real and applicable to themselves, and whether receiving the advice costs them something in how they see themselves.
Raise the relevance by changing who delivers the message, by using vivid narrative rather than statistics, by making the future self feel close rather than foreign.
Hershfield found that people who saw aged images of themselves allocated roughly twice as much to long-term savings as those who did not. The advice about saving had not changed. What changed was how real and continuous the future self felt to the person making the decision. Making the future self more imaginable is not a communication trick. It is a way of raising how relevant the consequence actually feels.
Lower the friction by removing the conditions that make receiving advice feel like admitting defeat. Advice that arrives inside a shared problem lands differently than advice that arrives as an assessment. This is why mentorship works better than performance review. It is why a peer who has struggled reaches you differently than an authority who has succeeded. The content can be identical. The friction is not.
For parents, this means accepting that you are, by definition, far from your teenager in the one dimension that matters most right now. Not in love or in knowledge, but in how close you are in time to the decision being warned about. The most useful thing is often not to sharpen the argument. It is to find someone closer in time who has already lived through it, and step back.
For leaders and organizations the same applies at a different scale. The case study that feels closest to your current position will do more work than the cautionary tale from an industry that feels safely different. The consultant who has recently been where you are is worth more than the one who knows the most about where you might end up.
For anyone sitting on advice they have already received but not yet moved on, the advice was almost certainly right. Most good advice is. What it lacked was not correctness but the conditions that would have made acting on it feel real and possible before something worse came along to force it.
That gap is closeable. It just does not close on its own.
Next article I am getting into something that sits at the center of every AI conversation happening right now. How tokens are actually processed by AI platforms, why inference costs are climbing faster than most people realize, and why the energy and compute demands behind every AI interaction are no longer a footnote in the story but the story itself. See you then.
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