I think this is right, and one implication is that 99.9% of the self-help content you passively consume on the internet will have no impact on your life, because (barring deliberate learning / repetition), you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it might have made a difference.
> you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it might have made a difference
But how would you learn to remember the right advice in the right context? The act of remembering something when you need it requires you to do more than just memorize it, you have to properly learn when the thing is actually useful and train your mind to recall this advice in those situations.
It is much better to know that an advice exist and learn when to look it up than to memorize the advice without the ability to realize when you would need it.
This brings up an interesting point -- while I think many people read and forget self-help books without ever improving their lives, the way they can mostly help people (imo) is by:
1) identifying a heuristic
2) making memorization easier through stories
The stories, analogies, acronyms they teach all just make memorizing/remembering/learning their heuristic easier
