What Works for One Person Does Not Work for Everyone

Today, October 7, 2026, I am getting ready to start my day. During the morning, I take care of a few pending tasks, have breakfast, and practice guitar for a while. This puts me in a good mood to begin the day, because I am generally not someone who starts the day with too much energy, and I need something that motivates me 🫠

For the past few days, I have been starting my mornings with something related to music, and playing guitar has been helping me a lot. I had put music aside a bit during the past few weeks because I was more focused on another project that requires a lot of my attention.

I have noticed that when I focus on something, I tend to overdo it and end up neglecting other areas of my life. That is why I am consciously trying to reclaim these spaces. With music, I have noticed something very simple: when I feel that I have made progress with it, I feel better at the end of the day.

An unexpected conversation on Instagram 🤩

Later, I go on Instagram and find a live session by an American sound engineer I started following recently. He often shares practical advice about music and managing the stage.

There were very few people connected, and he invited us to ask questions, so I took the opportunity to ask him about how to generate better interaction with the content one publishes.

His answer really resonated with me 😀

He told me that he would not really recommend one specific method. Instead, he would recommend trying different ways of doing things until you discover what works for each person.

In fact, he shared that one of the videos that had reached the most people on his account was one he had doubted publishing. Something he did not expect to work ended up working much better than he had imagined.

What works for one person does not necessarily work for another

While we were talking, I thought about how much this resembles what happens in therapy.

In therapy, we do not apply a single recipe either. What works for one person may not work for another. We can know different strategies and tools, but we need to consider each patient’s history, circumstances, and particular characteristics.

Something I like to explore is what the person has tried before and what result it had. If a strategy has already worked for them, it is probably important to take it into account. If it did not work, that also gives us information.

In that sense, the patient’s own experience often contributes more than assuming from the outside what should work for them.

Let’s pay attention to life’s recipes 🤔

This also makes me think about the amount of information we find every day on social media.

Methods for achieving happiness, feeling better, being more productive, or being successful constantly appear: “the three laws,” “the five steps,” “the ten keys.” Many times they are presented as if they were formulas that apply to everyone.

But if even in therapy we cannot assume that the same strategy works for everyone, we should probably be cautious when someone presents us with a universal recipe for life.

We can learn from other people’s experiences, take ideas, and try new strategies. But in the end, we also need to observe ourselves, experiment, and discover what truly works for us 😄