<insert many religious leaders here>
I have a coworker who is exactly like this. I think it’s just insecurity. She has never finished any of the collegeS she’s started, not even community college. She will often come into our break room and brag about she will beat me and other coworkers she knows doesn’t have a masters in getting her masters. She also claims she “knows” we will be fired in the near future because we don’t have one. You have to love her face when we say to her “But you don’t have any degree…” She’s just loud and stupid and thinks the louder she talks the more people will listen. You can only ignore know it alls. Really intelligent people tend to also be insightful and act like they weren’t raised in a barn. We started doing that and now she doesn’t spend time in the break room.
The thing I find interesting are the people who write books and travel around the world telling other people how to get rich. These folks are rich because they write books and travel around the world telling other people how to get rich. If they followed the advice in their books and presentations, they wouldn’t need to write books or travel all over the world giving presentations. I can’t understand the people who buy the books or pay to go listen to these guys: it is such a scam.
I also don’t understand people who pay financial advisors who are just as poor as they are. If the financial advisor had good advice, he’d be much better off financially than those who come to him for advice, but those guys rarely are.
This is true, people who have the most motivation to achieve X will sometimes be the most informed about how to do it, even if they themselves are too far gone to get there.
Another reason is that sometimes a person gets so desperate to achieve something that they will latch onto any idea they can, even if the idea works. False hope is better than despair, which can make a person sound like they have the answers when they are just trying to delude themselves.
I never said anything like that.
Astro makes a good point.
Ditto.
Just go to Facebook.
Those who make all the warm hearted quotes are normally the ones with the most fucked up lives.
This, I believe is absolutely correct. It’s also different in my head from the image given in the OP. From this I imagine someone with some humility sharing what (s)he’s learned from experience.
Reading the OP puts me in mind of my ex-husbands (yeah both of 'em. Don’t tell me I don’t have a type) who bloviate about how others should proceed as if they have not only the answer but the only answer. “The fastest way to grow your money is flipping houses!” (Said by a man who has never owned a house after the housing bubble already had burst, based on a set of “How to get rich flipping houses” cassettes - yes, really, cassettes- that he got from his dad but had never in fact listened to.)
I’ve know a couple of those know-it-alls. They have a dozen plans to get rich that us regular schmoes would never try because we aren’t smart enough to make it work. There was always a reason, someone else’s incompetence usually, why the plan didn’t work out this time but it’s never time to walk the straight and narrow.
They just need a few bucks to pay off a guy who was going to fix it so they didn’t have to pay rent this month. Then, if they can borrow my car, they can get some some equipment from a friend to make some easy money this weekend. That will set them up to cover the rent next month and then the money will start flowing in. What could go wrong?
My wife has a friend who “knows all the answers”. She and her husband have worked hair, played fair, invested wisely, and ARE if not rich, then financially stable for the rest of their lives. BUT one daughter died of cancer, one son died in a plane crash, and one son in a car accident. Since she’s always known that family is more important than things, her one consolation is in knowing that her children loved her, and that they knew she loved them.
Everyone else’s problems are always easier than your own. It doesn’t take much brains or insight to see that someone else should lose weight, stop drinking, fix their right rear tire, mow their lawn differently or lose a worthless partner. That each of those things has layers of difficulty can be glossed over by a person who doesn’t have to do it.
I used to have all the answers and be generous with sharing them. I really have reached an age where I’m no longer sure what the questions are, and give advice only when asked or when it seems really, really essential and worthwhile. I wish I could transfer knowledge and experience and judgment, especially to my kids and young colleagues, but the truth of the matter is that some things are never learned without burning your own damned fingers. At a certain point you stop trying to prevent the burn and just try to be there with a band-aid.
In a sense you did- you said that this guy says he knows all the answers to being rich, etc… yet is clearly not rich, so why isn’t he listening to his own advice?
The implication is that because he’s not rich, he obviously doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and he should be discounted.
Reread my OP and then your comment. You make it sound like I won’t listen to anyone who isn’t the top of something. That was NOT in my OP.
The guy I am talking about is the perpetual loser know-it-all. Someone else compared it to Cliffy from Cheers. It’s not that he isn’t rich. He isn’t even close. And his ideas all fall flat. Note that the bank wouldn’t even approve a small business loan for his idea, so he was hitting up me.
If he had ANY track record at all of ANYTHING positive coming from his ideas, I might consider it. Hell, for the sake of friendship, I even researched his ideas for this latest scheme. They are bonkers. Not just slightly off base, but way out of whack. As are all his ideas.
Quite frankly, if he would just work at what he’s good at, he might be in a little better shape.
Please, do not put words in my mouth that I didn’t say. 
Getting back to the start of this, sometimes people do know some answers but their life is still crap. Kind of like the cobbler’s children going shoeless. Their problem is that they can’t take their own advice, and I can sympathize with that.
The majority of anecdotes here describe the person who doesn’t have any answers and their life is crap, and in that case I guess they are taking their own advice. Sometimes when people advise me to do something I’ll ask them if that’s what they’ve done in their own life. The answers can be very revealing.
And, (again for friendship’s sake) I took my little spiel to a semi-anonymous message board so I could vent a little and yet not hurt his feelings. I do care about him. But I’m not funding his lunacy or getting caught up in any get-rich-quick scheme.
Others have chimed in with stories of their own friends and of being that way themselves, even if just a little bit. I find the comments interesting.
Bump, you’re a cool guy (girl?). No offense meant by me. thanks
The only people more annoying than those who won’t shut up on Facebook about exercise are people who do this and are fat. I just had a convo with someone today who was telling me about how some feat of exercise she engaged in recently didn’t work out so great, so I relayed my own personal anecdote of doing something that requires upper body strength for the first time in ages and being sore for days afterward. Of course this is followed up by some spiel about working hard in the gym or whatever. I wanted to say, “Okay, so then why are you fat?”
Obviously people who have screwed up are capable of giving solid advice (sometimes from learning from failures firsthand), but when folks with the chronic inability to get their shit together feel the chronic need to lecture everyone else about how to straighten out theirs, it is superlatively irritating.
A 300-lb coworker likes to lecture me about nutrition.
My boss will go on a droning monologue for hours about the importance of good communications, reading people, and situational awareness while I sit there silently gazing off into space for 20 minutes. Yeah buddy, you’re totally got your finger on the pulse of this interaction.
A variation on the breed. The person whose life isnt exactly crap (but they ain’t exactly rich and famous either).
But they know more than anybody about anything and are damn sure THEY are right. And its about EVERYTHING. They meet a rocket scientist at bar? They know more about rocket engines than that guy. And they will argue with the guy about it. That sorta thing.
I’ve known a couple. I call them “subject matter experts”. Because no matter what the subject matter, they know all about it and more than anyone else.
One was so bad you could come up with a topic you’d even swear they had never even heard about and you could get a half hour lecture about it two moments after you mentioned it.