Seek Contrarians Who Challenge You

On his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly began to write down for his young adult children some things he had learned about life that he wished he had known earlier. Kelly’s timeless advice covers an astonishing range, from right living to setting ambitious goals, optimizing generosity, and cultivating compassion.

Excellent Advice for Living is the ideal companion for anyone seeking to navigate life with grace and creativity:

Episode sponsors:

Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud ⁠⁠⁠by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money.⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ramp.com

Automate compliance, security, and trust with Vanta.⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Vanta helps you win trust, close deals, and stay secure—faster and with less effort⁠⁠⁠⁠. ⁠⁠⁠Find out how increased security leads to more customers by going to Vanta⁠⁠⁠. Tell them David from Founders sent you and you'll get $1000 off.

Collateral⁠⁠ transforms your complex ideas into compelling narratives. Collateral crafts institutional grade marketing collateral for private equity, private credit, real estate, venture capital, family offices, hedge funds, oil & gas companies, and all kinds of corporations. Storytelling is one of the highest forms of leverage and you should invest heavily in it. You can do that by going to ⁠⁠https://collateral.com

Some of my favorite quotes from the episode:

1. Choose to believe that the entire universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success.

2. Mastering the view through the eyes of others will unlock many doors.

3. If you can avoid seeking the approval of others your power is limitless.

4. The reward for good work is more work.

5. Don’t be the best. Be the only.

6. The urgent is a tyrant. The important should be your king.

7. Find smart people who will disagree with you.

8. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

9. The most counterintuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others the more you'll get.

10. Life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships.

11. Courtesy costs nothing.

12. Life lessons will be presented to you in the order they are needed.

13. Cultivate an allergy to average.

14. If you repeated what you did today 365 more times would you be where you want to be next year?

15. If you are alive that means you still have lessons to learn.

16. Master something.Through mastery of one thing you'll command a viewpoint to steadily find where your bliss is.

17. Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.

18. First, always ask for what you want. Works in relationships, business, life.

19. If nobody else does what you do you won't need a resume.

20. How to apologize: quickly, specifically, sincerely.

21. You choose to be lucky by believing that any setbacks are just temporary.

22. The best way to advise people is to find out what they really want to do and then advise them to do it.

23. It is certain that 99% of the stuff you are anxious about won't happen.

24. What is important is not what happened to you but what you did about what happened to you.

25. Your golden ticket is being able to see things from other people's point of view.

26. Pay attention to who you are around when you feel best. Be with them more often.

27. To get your message across follow this formula: simplify, simplify, simplify, then exaggerate.

28. You will thrive more when you promote what you love rather than bash what you hate.

29. To be interesting just tell your own story with uncommon honesty.

30. When you truly think for yourself your conclusions will not be predictable.

31. Don’t measure your life with someone else’s ruler.

32. For maximum results focus on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

33. Pay attention to what you pay attention to.