A lesson I've learned slowly and hard is that advice is a terrible thing to give.
I, personally, find it very hard not to just anecdote and assume that'll do. Ignoring all privilege, survivor bias etc. But most advice is a variety of this pointed tweet from Peter Yang:
"Just had a call with someone on Forbes 30 under 30 list and came away really impressed.
He shared with me how he made VP at a top tech company before age 30:
4:30 AM wakeup
2. Cold showers
3. Gratitude journal
4. Meditate
5. Dad owns tech company"
That's probably why I normally end up saying some variant of 'I read this interesting thing once, it might be relevant in your circumstances'. That's really what this whole project is. And that's valid, right? Books can be mentors:
"Who was or still is your mentor?
Multiple mentors in the form of books. I never had any personal contact with Raymond Williams but Culture and Society meant the world to me. At the same time that I was reading Williams in my early twenties, I was lucky enough to share a slum with a friend, Chris Mitchell, who was interested in many of the same things as me. Friends are always preferable to mentors."
So here's some advice about advice: beware advice from successful people. Summed up by Tamar Haspel talking about gardening.
"A lot of first-timers are making the same mistake: They’re listening to experts. Experts can make things grow that you can’t, because they are experts. What you need is a terrible gardener to tell you what anybody can grow."
I used to be obsessed with all those articles about the habits of successful people. How they got up at 5am to read Sun Tzu on their rowing machine. It took me a while to realise that the habits were normally enabled by success, not producers of it. You can do all that if someone is also looking after your kids, your laundry and your inbox.
Rachel Syme puts it better in a lovely piece in the New Yorker about deadlines.
"Mason Currey's "Daily Rituals" books (which have been translated into more than half a dozen languages) impart the quotidian habits of creative types from Albert Einstein to Twyla Tharp. Benjamin Franklin started his day with "air baths"-reading and writing in the nude until he had something else to do-and Edith Wharton wrote longhand in bed, "on sheets of paper that she dropped onto the floor for her secretary to retrieve and type up." All these glimpses into the lives of Highly Effective People can seem like recipes for success, but read enough of them and you may conclude that the secret ingredients are not much sleep and a lot of professional help."
And Viv Groskop makes a similar point in How to Own the Room:
"Lots of women say, ‘If I was going to be a speaker, I’d want to speak like Michelle Obama.’ But if you had Michelle Obama’s support system, you probably would be able to speak like Michelle Obama very easily."
Cory writes along the same lines in this piece about 'breaking in' as a writer
He ends with the real point of all this:
"Established writers know nothing useful about breaking into the field today. But we do have a powerful tool for helping out new writers: encouragement. The specifics of breaking in change enormously from year to year, but one thing remains eternal: breaking in is hard, and it’s easy to get discouraged. The kindnesses we show to would-be writers are worth far more than any list of markets or tips on writing cover letters."
That's probably mostly what I'm trying to offer over coffee with people. Encouragement. So let me know if you need some.