#410 Excellent Advice for Living

On my 60 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 wish I'd known when I was younger. I am primarily channeling the wisdom of the ages. I'm offering advice that I've heard from others, or timeless knowledge repeated from the past, or a modern aphorism that matched my own experience. I think of these bits as seeds because each one of them could easily be expanded into a long essay. Indeed, I spent most of my time writing by compressing these substantial lessons into as compact and treatable forms as possible. You are encouraged to expand these seeds as you read to fill your own situation. If you find these proverbs aligned with your experience, share them with someone younger than yourself. That is an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is excellent advice for living, wisdom I wish I'd known earlier, and it was written by Kevin Kelly. I was not planning to make an episode on this book. I randomly discovered this book from one of my friends' Instagram stories. I immediately bought it, downloaded it to my Kindle, and then read the entire thing in one sitting. And so I just wanna run through the bits of advice that I highlighted, And then if anything came to mind, I made notes on it, and I'll share those with you as well. The first maximum or aphorism that he has here is being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points. The next one is listening well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love, keep asking them, is there more until there is no more? I actually think there's a lot of these pieces of advice that he gives that work for both your personal and your work relationships. I think that one works for work as well. This one definitely works for work. Always demand a deadline because it weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better. That is so important. It's actually one of the main points in Ed Catmull, who's the cofounder of Pixar. He wrote this great autobiography called Creativity Inc. And what he knows, he says, without a deadline, people can always justify more time and more money in the name of making it better. There must be a cut by date. What is also fascinating is what Christopher Nolan said about this. A deadline is often a creative accelerator, not a creative killer, because it forces …