Reddit mentions of Understanding Motivation and Emotion

>You gripe all the time about the things you don't like, but I never, if ever, see you give due praise.

You deserve some praise for an admirable work ethic, as it seems you have looked into research literature without external pressure, and for your desire to help your community.

However, IMHO, /u/Azdahak's criticisms are also quite apt.

Your advice, if it was presented as tidbits or food for thought -- as suggested by a few studies in the literature -- would not be so much of a problem.

What is a problem, from a "scientific" point of view if you will, is your asserting that you have anything amounting to "proof," or that you are sharing "facts." Even researchers in the hard sciences are hesitant to describe anything as a fact. (Part of the reason being that in any science, you can never prove anything correct -- you can only disprove things. The failure to disprove something despite energetic and motivated attempts to disprove it is pretty much the closest we get to "fact.") In psychology, largely fraught with the inability to directly assess variables of interest (such as happiness, motivation, attention), the amount of caution required is several orders of magnitude larger.

There is nothing wrong with sharing a few research-informed tidbits that you drew from the research literature on goal setting. However, if you are coming away thinking your account is a complete and factual one, you are considerably underestimating the complexity and variety of research within the related fields you're reviewing.

Consider that entire textbooks are devoted to the topics of Emotion and Motivation (with this textbook being a particularly interesting read). You can see different excerpts through Amazon and Google books, but just to illustrate the point, the textbook includes multipronged advice on goal-setting, diagrams presenting why these strategies should work, supported by literature reviews in the text, acknowledgment of complexity and contextual effects in determining whether a strategy is good or bad, which is then summarized and reiterated.

So consider your typical advice to never ever tell anyone your intentions. You have presented this as a "fact" with such tiny exceptions that the rule can essentially stand in almost all situations. However, these excerpts from two different chapters of this text raise situations where telling someone may not have harm (provided it leads to some of these other enhancing factors). For instance, if you tell someone and they help you make the goal more specific and create if-then implementation intentions, and/or offer performance feedback, that could certainly make it worthwhile. Or if you had a prevention mindset and wanted to avoid being shamed, telling someone (in order to make that a salient threat) might be an effective way of motivating yourself, even if it might not work for those with a promotion-mindset (for whom the gain in esteem among their peers may be success enough).

Please understand, I am not trying to shit on you or your efforts. I honestly believe you are well-meaning. I am guessing people have been unpleasant and rejecting towards you before, and I can see how that would make you understandably sensitive to criticism, and prone to feeling like critical feedback is a personal attack. I am not trying to attack you, I am simply trying to illustrate why saying you have "proof" or "facts" draws such ire. And while I know that some of your self-portrayal as ENTP Messiah is probably a little tongue-in-cheek, it is still frustrating to see legitimately interesting, albeit blunt tidbits of advice getting advertised as factual summaries of entire fields of psychology.

This isn't an attempt to rob your legitimate qualities which deserve praise -- again, that you even have looked into the literature as much as you have is admirable. It is great that you aren't just citing pop psych magazine articles. It is an attempt to provide some feedback on how you communicate your findings (so that they can be maximally informative, and minimally misleading). All I would ask is that you are a bit more upfront and careful (both internally and externally) about knowing and stating the limitations of your own research (as all research has limitations). That is the mark of good science, and it actually makes you more credible, not less.