Excellence Advice for Living by Kevin Kelly (9/10)

Personal Growth and Mindset

• Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.
• A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.
• Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
• The advantage of a ridiculously ambitious goal is that it sets the bar very high so even in failure it may be a success measured by the ordinary.
• Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.
• Tend to the small things. More people are defeated by blisters than mountains.
• To cultivate a habit, switch your language from “I can or can’t do” to “I do or don’t do.” You shift the weight from a wavering choice to an unwavering identity.
• You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.
• The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.
• The foundation of maturity: Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility.
• Be strict with yourself, forgiving of others. The reverse is hell for everyone.
• What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.
• The consistency of your endeavors (exercise, companionship, work) is more important than the quantity. Nothing beats small things done every day, which is way more important than what you do occasionally.
• We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Miraculous things can be accomplished if you give it 10 years. A long game will compound small gains that will be able to overcome even big mistakes.
• You can’t change your past, but you can change your story about it. What is important is not what happened to you but what you did about what happened to you.
• Ask anyone you admire: their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So, embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.

Professional and Career Development

• Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary and it prevents you from trying to make it perfect so you have to make it different. Different is much better.
• If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. Hang out with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.
• Don’t be the best. Be the only.
• If your goal does not have a schedule, it is a dream.
• When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself, ‘Would I accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow?’ Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.
• If you ask for someone’s feedback, you’ll get a critic. But if you instead ask for advice, you’ll get a partner.
• 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.
• Recipe for success: under promise and overdeliver.
• Show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you where you’re going.
• Finite games are played to win or lose. Infinite games are played to keep the game going. Seek out infinite games because they yield unlimited rewards.
• Don’t ever work for someone who you don’t want to become.
• Figure out what time of day you are most productive and protect that time period.
• Don’t say anything about someone in an email that you would not be comfortable saying to them directly because eventually they will read it.
• Do more of what looks like work to others but is play to you.
• For maximum results, focus on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.
• Go with the option that opens up yet more options.

Leadership Development

• Don’t be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of that same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.
• When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.
• You lead by letting others know what you expect of them, which may exceed what they themselves expect. Provide them a reputation that they can step up to.
• Nothing elevates a person higher than taking responsibility for their mistakes. If you mess up, fess up. It’s astounding how powerful this ownership is.
• When you’re checking references for a job applicant, their employer may have prohibited from saying anything negative, so leave or send a message that says, “get back to me if you highly recommend this applicant as super great.” If they don’t reply, take that as a negative.
• Speak confidently as if you are right but listen carefully as if you are wrong.
• When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers.
• Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.
• Constantly search for overlapping areas of agreement and dwell there. Disagreements will appear to be edge cases.
• If you want something to get done, ask a busy person to do it.
• Always be quick to give credit and to take blame.
• When you are presented with a task that could be completed in 2 minutes or less, do it immediately.

Relationships and Social Skills

• You don’t have to attend every argument you are invited to.
• How to apologize? Quickly, specifically, sincerely. Don’t ruin an apology with an excuse.
• Treating a person to a meal never fails and is so easy to do. It’s powerful with old friends and it’s a great way to make new friends.
• The more that you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. So to be interesting, be interested.
• The golden rule will never fail you. It is the foundation of all the other virtues.
• Perhaps the most counterintuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding that is the beginning of wisdom.
• Friends are better than money. Almost anything that money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways, a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.
• Forgiveness is accepting the apology you will never get.
• When you are young, have friends who are older; when you are old, have friends who are younger.
• Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
• Before you are old attend as many funerals as you can bear and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people mention is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.
• It is not a compliment if it comes with a request.
• Outlaw the word “you” during domestic arguments.
• Don’t reserve your kindest praise for a person until their eulogy. Tell them while they are alive, when it makes a difference to them, write it in a letter they can keep.
• Ignore what others may be thinking of you because they aren’t thinking of you.
• A wise man said: Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates – “Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?”
• Assume no one remembers name. As a courtesy, reintroduce yourself by name even to those you have previously met: “Hi, I’m Kevin.”
• If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go further, go together.
• When sharing, one person divides, the other chooses.
• A proper apology consists of conveying the 3 Rs: regret (genuine empathy with the other), responsibility (not blaming someone else), and remedy (your willingness to fix it).

Parenting and Family Life

• To build strong children, reinforce their sense of belonging to a family by articulating exactly what is distinctive about your family. They should be able to say with pride, “Our family does X.”
• When a child asks an endless string of:” Why?” questions, the smartest reply is “I don’t know, what do you think?”
• Children totally accept – and crave – family rules. “In our family we have a rule for X” is the only excuse a parent needs for setting a family policy. In fact, “I have a rule for X” is the only excuse you need for your own personal policies.
• For the best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should but double the time with them.
• The very best thing you can do for your kids is to love your spouse.
• Let your children choose their punishments. They’ll be tougher than you will.
• Instead of asking your child what they learned today, ask them who they helped today.
• Invent as many family rituals as you can handle with ease. Anything done on a schedule – large or small, significant or silly – can become a ritual. Repeated consistently small routines become legendary. Anticipation is key.
• You’ll get 10 times better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior, especially in children and animals.

Financial Wisdom and Management

• Don’t measure your life with someone else’s ruler.
• Don’t bother asking a barber if you need a haircut. Pay attention to incentives.
• At first, buy the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.
• Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction, but acquiring experiences will.
• All great prizes in life in wealth, relationships, or knowledge come from the magic of compounding interest, by amplifying small steady gains. All you need for abundance is to keep adding 1% more than you subtract on a regular basis.
• Be frugal in all things, except in your passions. Select a few interests that you gleefully splurge on. In fact, be all-around thrifty so that you can splurge on your passions.
• The general strategy for real estate is to buy the worst property on the best street.
• Measure your wealth not by the things you can buy but the things that no money can buy.
• The rich have money. The wealthy have time. It is easier to become wealthy than rich.
• The natural state of all possessions is to need repair and maintenance. What you own will eventually own you. Choose selectively.
• It is impossible for you to become poor by giving. It is impossible for you to become wealthy without giving.

General Life Advice

• You can’t reason someone out of a notion that they didn’t reason themselves into.
• The best way to learn anything is to try to teach what you know.
• The purpose of the habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it, you just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth to flossing.
• Don’t let someone else’s urgency become your emergency. In fact, don’t be governed by the urgent of any sort. Focus on the important. The urgent is the tyrant. The important should be your king. Down with the tyranny of the urgent!
• When brainstorming, improvising, jamming with others, you’ll go much further and deeper if you build upon each contribution with a playful “yes – and” example instead of a deflating “no, but” reply.
• Measure twice, cut once.
• Each time you connect to people, bring them a blessing; then they’ll be happy to see you when you bring a problem.
• People can’t remember more than three points in a speech.
• The greatest teacher is called “doing.”
• Criticize in private, praise in public.
• When you have good news and bad news, give the bad news first, because we remember how things end more than how they begin. So, elevate the ending with good news.
• Your time and space are limited. Remove, give away, throw out anything that no longer gives you joy in order to make room for those that do.
• When speaking to an audience, it’s better to gaze on a few people than to “spray” your gaze across the room. Your eyes telegraph to others whether you really believe what you’re saying.
• The purpose of listening is not to reply, but to hear what is not being said.
• The greatest killer of happiness is comparison. If you must compare, compare yourself to you yesterday.