Good advice is conditional. It starts with the other person’s map, not yours.
Good advice can come from your personal and lived experience, but that experience should not be the sole pedestal from which you prescribe. The moment you assume that what worked for you will work for someone else, you’ve already missed the point.
The best pieces of advice I’ve ever given or received have one thing in common: they are conditional. They take into account who the person is, what they have, what they want, and what the situation actually allows. If you can’t do that, you’re not giving advice. You’re giving a monologue.
So how do you give good advice?
Start Where They Are
In another piece I wrote about how to build your life, I argued that it works like GPS: you need to know where you are and where you’re going before you can plot a route. The same applies when someone asks you for advice.
Who is this person?
What do they have at their disposal: money, networks, health, time, country, constraints?
What might have led them to this situation?
You’re not building a plan for yourself. You’re helping them build a plan for their life. So the first step is to understand their coordinates. If you skip that and jump straight to “here’s what I would do,” you’re almost certainly wrong, because you’re not them. They might not have your resources. They might not want your outcome. They might be in a context where your move would backfire. So ask. Listen. Map their world before you suggest a path.
Honour the Nuance
Context changes everything. I’ve written about nuance before: the same action can be right in one situation and wrong in another. When you give advice, you have to honour that. What works in Nigeria might not work in Rwanda. What works when you’re 22 and single might not work when you’re 35 with dependants. What works when the market is hot might not work when it’s not.
So good advice is full of “it depends.” If you have X and want Y, then this. If you have A and want B, then that. You’re not being wishy-washy. You’re being accurate. The moment you give a one-size-fits-all prescription, you’ve stopped advising and started projecting.
Don’t Assume They Want What You Want
Most bad advice comes from a simple mistake: we assume the other person wants what we want.
We want to build a billion-dollar company; so we tell them to go all in on their startup.
We want to leave the country; so we tell them to apply for every scholarship.
We want to be famous; so we tell them to put themselves out there.
But maybe they want stability. Maybe they want to stay close to family. Maybe they want a quiet life. You don’t get to decide their goals. You get to help them reach theirs. So before you prescribe, you have to understand: what do they want out of this? And if they don’t know yet, your job isn’t to decide for them. It’s to present the options and the tradeoffs: if you do this, here’s what might happen; if you do that, here’s what might happen, and let them choose.
Good advice doesn’t force a decision on the spot. It clarifies the map so they can decide when they’re ready.
Make It Conditional
So the structure of good advice looks like this: Given who you are, what you have, and what you want, here are the paths. Here are the likely consequences of each. Here’s what I’d lean toward, and why. But you’re the one who has to live with it. That’s conditional. It’s also honest. You’re not claiming to know their life better than they do. You’re offering a lens.
If you can’t put yourself in their shoes, if you can’t develop enough empathy or understand the different consequences of the choices they might make; then maybe you’re not the right person to give this particular advice.
And maybe the best thing you can say is: “I don’t know your situation well enough. Here’s someone who might.”
Use Your Experience: Don’t Impose It
Your experience is valuable. It’s what lets you see pitfalls and possibilities they might miss. So use it. But use it as data, not as a script. “When I was in a similar situation, I did X, and here’s what happened. Your situation might be different because of Y, so you might consider Z.”
That’s advice.
“You should do X because I did X” is not.
One respects their agency and their context. The other tries to clone your life onto theirs. They’re not you. Their map is different. Help them read it; don’t redraw it in your image.
So when someone asks you what they should do, don’t lead with your story. Lead with theirs. Map where they are. Honour the nuance. Unpack what they want. Then give them options, clearly and conditionally. That’s how you give advice that actually helps.