The best I ever received? Start saving and investing when you’re young to benefit from compound interest over time. I didn’t take the advice, but I received it!
You're doing neither yourself nor anyone else a favour by being overly shy and reticent. You yourself will enjoy life much more when you are yourself and while not everyone will like you, the ones who don't often don't stay in your life long and it's easier to find people you vibe with if they can see you for who you are.
Granted, I very much did not take this advice as a teenager and even now I'm occasionally too shy. But looking back it was good advice and I really wish I hadn't wasted so much time and energy on not being negatively noticed by people I didn't really care about then and who haven't been in my life for years.
Just needed a friend to care enough to say something so simple, and it changed my life. Sobriety is terrifying for so many, but in my experience it was absolutely worth it.
Survivorship bias is a thing. Just because someone is successful doesn't mean following their advice will make you successful. "I put all my money into lottery tickets and now I'm a multi-millionaire. Everyone should do what I did!"
The emergency fund comes first $1000 or 6 months expenses tends to be the sweet spot. It keeps you from taking on bad debt like credit cards and pay day loans. 5% of your paycheck is a good place to get started, that's usually enough to build up funds fairly quickly without hurting too much.
Retirement doesn't have to be a ton of money each pay check, especially if you start early in life, but if you ever want to retire you have to start as soon as possible because the later you start the more money you have to put away. Take the company match on a 401(k) or 5-20% of your paycheck. Invest in a target date fund or S&P 500, Russell 2000 fund, or whole market fund (and look at the expense ratio, you want that to be as low as possible) and call it a day. Individual stocks are for suckers, but if you want to gamble with individual stocks use 1-5% of your portfolio to do it so it's not the end of the world if you pick a loser.
Finding your target for retirement is a big step to knowing what you need to save early. Play around with some retirement calculators and debt payoff calculators fairly often as your target number may change based on your lifestyle.
When I was getting started in my design career getting jobs was hard. I had a good portfolio but not much experience. Met another designer one day and told her my dimena. Her response: Just lie. She told me everyone does to get work. So I took that advice. Next job I got paid me 2x the previous one and soon enough I wasn't lieing anymore. You think Musk got where he is today thanks to ethics and honesty? Jobs and Gates both stole either knowledge or actual products from others. I still have friends submitting resumes with large gaps, asking for help. They send it over and I embellish the hell of it, always works.
"We choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. This is just one of those other things." - My dad quoting JFK at me to get me to do the dishes as a teenager. I don't think he would remember even saying that to me, but has always stuck with me. Something said about something so monumental being applied to something so benign. But that wasn't the point, because it was hard for me.