Number one, how dare you

Opinions and advice are close cousins. Sharing an opinion is like saying "hey, here's what I think." Giving advice is like saying "hey, here's what you should think." I feel more comfortable with the former, because I'm reticent to take up too much space and maybe because I have my own streak of pigheaded independent obstinance. This is why I'm writing within the Opinion Zone™ rather than the Advice Quadrant (trademark this one at your leisure.)

Advice has to be desired in order to be valuable. Maybe one day, when I'm a little more grizzled — and when young professionals are considerably relatively younger — I'll find that I can get away with the old "Hey kid, can I tell you something?" But I will probably just wait to be asked because my voice is not naturally gravely and I do not intend to pick up smoking just to deepen it. Advice is dangerous even when it's requested, and so I'll still have to lead with caveats, anyway.

Advice can not be given in a sentence

Others have spoken of the difficulty in giving advice: it's hard to remove bias; it's hard to pull the important bits out of a life full of context; it's impossible to avoid the phrase "it depends." This has an implication for someone trying to learn something: never take advice. Or maybe take a lot of advice but don't take any of it too seriously. Maybe just listen to the stuff that feels universal. Maybe just wear sunscreen.

I think that another strategy, though annoying because it takes longer, is to treat advice like a whole conversation. My partner and I asked an experienced woodworking uncle for thoughts on building a privacy wall for a deck that we constructed laboriously over the course of a summer. He recalled some of the flourished trim work of our craftsman home and suggested designs with fancy internal joinery to match. We gave it a shot and our unskilled hands produced rickety fruits. Of course his advice hid his years of practice; our simple acceptance of his ideas hid our understanding of our capability.

The act of asking for advice implies an expertise gap between the giver and receiver. The bridge over that gap is not what the giver would do in the receiver's shoes today; it's what they'd do if they were ten years younger and had only a bit of a better idea about what to do next. It's the receiver's responsibility to know themselves enough to be able to say "well that sounds great, but here's where I'm actually at." We ended up with straight wooden slats in our wall, but we varied their spacing in a way that's informed by our home's ornamentation without overtaxing our fledgling skill.

Once bitten, scarred

Our actions are informed by the stories that we tell ourselves about our prior experiences. I am a good cook; I avoid conflict; I am kind; I am not ambitious. I carry narratives around in my head that help me, sometimes, to make choices about I should do next. This is advice that my past self gives to my present, but the experience gap from of my past can be as wide and unhelpful as any. Age brings wisdom and reticence. I will not put my hand on a hot stove twice, but should I shy away from a new venture because I've risked in the past and lost?

Maybe! But my circumstances are different now than they were then, and so maybe not. My internal narrative is so implicitly experienced that it's difficult to recognize what it really is: an external source whose advice comes from a context and set of abilities that may no longer match my own. It's important to interrogate advice from myself as thoroughly as from others.

Figuring out what to do next can be exhausting, which is why it's so tempting to delegate the task to someone who appears to have already made the correct decision. Or to follow our gut and do what we've done in the past. Neither of these yield the best outcome, which starts by asking for long-form help and following the request up with an even longer conversation. It's important to ask for advice. I that it's also important to be of service to other folks, and to share how I conceive of the experiences I've been given. I'll stay ready for someone in the far future to say, "Hey old guy, can you tell me something?"

Thanks for your time and attention.