Not from a life coach, per­sonal devel­op­ment guru, or some other self-professed expert on life, but from those whose advice I think it’s actu­ally worth pay­ing atten­tion to: those older than you.

First is Life Advice From Old Peo­ple (via Kot­tke)–a video blog con­tain­ing noth­ing but inter­views with a wide range of ‘old’ peo­ple, includ­ing Farmer Tom, Jon Voight and Errol Mor­ris.

Some more colour­ful advice comes from The Musty Man (via Ben Cas­nocha) who, on his 30th birth­day, decided to offer some no-nonsense advice to those liv­ing in their 20’s. The best of the Musty Man’s advice I’ve read is on rela­tion­ships, although it’s all great.

As is the stan­dard at MeFi, the advice offered to this recent grad­u­ate is more func­tional and emi­nently use­ful. This is one piece of advice I sub­scribe to wholeheartedly:

Make your bed every day — as soon as you get up. Some­thing about that one small thing sets the tone for the rest of the day; are you going to be lazy, or are you going to get some­thing done?

More con­cisely, this list of 30 pieces of advice for young men from an old man is fairly good, espe­cially the last item:

97% of all advice is worth­less. Take what you can use, and trash the rest.

As for advice from meta-careerists; Ben Casnocha’s thoughts mir­ror mine perfectly:

The best advice on net­work­ing will come from some­one who is not a pro­fes­sional net­worker. The best advice on entre­pre­neur­ship will come some­one whose entre­pre­neur­ship is not sell­ing books and work­shops about entre­pre­neur­ship. Writ­ers who write about any­thing other than writ­ing for a liv­ing usu­ally have the best advice on writing.

Like many oth­ers in my sit­u­a­tion (some­one attempt­ing to fig­ure out the direc­tion they want their life to go in) I love hear­ing advice from a diverse range of peo­ple. If you have some, or even just a choice quote, please offer it up in the com­ments. I would appre­ci­ate it more than you can imagine.