Excellent Advice for Living

Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

Kevin Kelly helped launch Wired and is a wonderfully brilliant, iconoclastic, wise human being. Excellent Advice for Living is a tiny little book packed with pithy wisdom, the kind of book where I could literally open to any page and riff on a gem or two. What makes it so fun is that each compact line opens into a much bigger truth about how to live, work, recover from mistakes, stay enthusiastic, and keep aiming at what matters most over the long arc of a life. This Note plays with a handful of my favorite seeds from the book and connects them to wisdom from Emerson, Wooden, Rotella, James Clear, and others, all in service to helping us apply the ideas right now. Big Ideas we explore include +25 IQ Points, The Only, Behavior -> Thinking, Compound Interest, and Good Bad Days.

Big Ideas

On my sixty-eighth birthday, I decided to give my young adult children some advice. I am not a frequent advice giver but soon I was able to write down 68 bits. To my surprise, I had more to say than I thought. So for the next several years I wrote down a batch of advice on my birthday, and shared it with my family and friends. They wanted more. I kept going until I had about 450 bits of advice I wished I’d know when I was younger.

I am primarily channeling the wisdom of the ages. I am offering advice I have heard from others, or timeless knowledge repeated from the past, or a modern aphorism that matched my own experience. I doubt any of it is truly original, although I have tried to put everything in my own words. I think of these bits as seeds because each one of them could easily be expanded into a long essay. Indeed, I have spent most of my time writing by compressing these substantial lessons into as compact and tweetable forms as possible. You are encouraged to expand these seeds as you read to fill your own situation.

If you find these proverbs align with your experience, share them with someone younger than yourself.

Kevin Kelly helped launch Wired magazine and is a wonderfully brilliant, iconoclastic, wise human being.

This is a tiny little book PACKED with pithy wisdom. (Get a copy here.)

I could *literally* open up to any page and riff on a gem or two on it. (No joke.)

Instead, I’ll pick five of my favorites and we’ll have fun playing with those seeds and seeing if we can help you apply that wisdom to your life TODAY.

Let’s get to work!

P.S. The book reminded me of another iconoclastic legend: Rick Rubin and his The Creative Act. Check out those Notes.