Belle Lettre has one of her characteristically frank and thoughtful posts on the topic of advice given to aspiring and junior academics. Here’s a taste:
All young academics stumble as they take their first steps. Sometimes the guidance they receive hampers their progress, constrianing them to the path immediately ahead and the most efficient route to tenure. Sometimes the guidance they receive is inadvertant and serendipitious, sending them off to new paths and avenues of discovery and knowledge, and so they continue to stumble rather than march. In either case, they stumble. But they also move forward. Either under the "wing" of another (or, more cynically, the restrictions inherent in a closed and stagnant academic system) or on their own two awkward feet, they move foward, closer to some fate.