This is a book summary of Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly (Amazon).
Well, actually, you can’t really do a book summary of this book. Instead, this “summary” includes my 50 favorite bits of wisdom from Kevin Kelly.
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s paraphrased).
- All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
- Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.
Book Summary Contents:
- About the Book
- Learning & Thinking
- Creating & Giving
- Comparison & Knowing Yourself
- Passion & Purpose
- Habits & Work
- Relationships & Knowing Others
- Arguments & Manipulation
- Experimenting & The Future
50 Life Lessons from Excellent Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly (Book Summary)
About the Book
“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 known 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.”
- “If you find these proverbs align with your experience, share them with someone younger than yourself.”
50 Life Lessons from Kevin Kelly
“Life lessons will be presented to you in the order they are needed. Everything you need to master the lesson is within you. Once you have truly learned a lesson you will be presented with the next one. If you are alive that means you still have lessons to learn.”
Learning & Thinking:
1. “The fact that you ‘can’t do’ something can be embarrassing. But if you are ‘learning to do’ something that is admirable. There are only tiny baby steps between can’t and learning.”
2. “Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.”
3. “The best way to learn anything is to try to teach what you know.”
4. “Curiosity is fatal to certainty. The more curious you are the less certain you’ll be.”
5. “The biggest lie we tell ourselves is ‘I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.'”
6. “Expand your mind by thinking with your feet on a walk or with your hand in a notebook. Think outside your brain.”
7. “Draw to discover what you see. Write to discover what you think.”
8. “Ignore what others may be thinking of you because they aren’t thinking of you.”
Creating & Giving:
9. “To transcend the influence of your heroes copy them shamelessly like a student until you get them out of your system. That is the way of all masters.”
10. “Separate the processes of creating from improving. You can’t write and edit or sculpt and polish or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgment.”
11. “Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe.”
12. “Perhaps the most counterintuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.”
13. “It is impossible for you to become poor by giving. It is impossible for you to become wealthy without giving.”
Comparison & Knowing Yourself:
14. “Don’t measure your life with someone else’s ruler.”
15. “Don’t compare your inside to someone else’s outside.”
16. “The small person believes they are superior; the superior person knows they are lucky.”
17. “That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult —if you don’t lose it.”
18. “You are never too young to wonder ‘Why am I still doing this?’ You need to have an excellent answer.”
19. “A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.”
Passion & Purpose:
20. “Be frugal in all things except in your passions.”
21. “Your passions should fit you exactly but your purpose in life should exceed you.”
22. “You will complete your mission in life when you figure out what your mission in life is. Your purpose is to discover your purpose. This is not a paradox. This is the way.”
23. “Making art is not selfish; it’s for the rest of us. If you don’t do your thing you are cheating us.”
24. “If nobody else does what you do you won’t need a resume.”
25. “Don’t be the best. Be the only.”
Habits & Work:
26. “The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it.”
27. “Shorten your to-do list by asking yourself ‘What is the worst that will happen if this does not get done?’ Eliminate all but the disasters.”
28. “You are what you do. Not what you say not what you believe not how you vote but what you spend your time on.”
29. “What you do instead of work might become your real work.”
30. “Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.”
31. “Work for something much larger than yourself.”
Relationships & Knowing Others:
32. “Life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships.”
33. “Trust me: There is no ‘them.'”
34. “If you ask for someone’s feedback you’ll get a critic. But if instead you ask for advice you’ll get a partner.”
35. “When someone tells you what ticks them off they are telling you what makes them tick.”
36. “You can reduce the annoyance of someone’s stupid belief by increasing your understanding of why they believe it.”
37. “Rule of 3 in conversation: To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and then once more. The third time’s answer is the one closest to the truth.”
Arguments & Manipulation:
38. “You don’t have to attend every argument you are invited to.”
39. “Whenever there is an argument between two sides find the third side.”
40. “Your opinion on a contentious issue gains power when you can argue the opposite side as well as they can.”
41. “Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind be kind. No exceptions. Don’t confuse kindness with weakness.”
42. “Don’t be in haste. When you are in a hurry you are more easily conned or manipulated.”
43. “You should demand extraordinary evidence in order to believe extraordinary claims.”
44. “Don’t bother asking a barber if you need a haircut. Pay attention to incentives.”
Experimenting & The Future:
45. “Prototype your life. Try stuff instead of making grand plans.”
46. “When crises strike don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.”
47. “Whenever you can’t decide which path to take pick the one that produces change.”
48. “Be a good ancestor. Do something a future generation will thank you for.”
49. “In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong. A good question to ask yourself today is ‘What might I be wrong about?’ This is the only worry worth having.”
50. “Over the long term the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore the multitude of problems we create; you just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves.”
Remember:
“Advice like these are not laws. They are like hats. If one doesn’t fit, try another.”
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