Here are four links each related as they offer some form of advice or lessons, concepts or truths. Your mileage may vary, but your attention will be rewarded. Enjoy!
On his most recent birthday, Kevin Kelly followed up on his Excellent Advice for Living book/project with an additional 101 short pieces of advice—things he wish he’d known before he knew them. These are great. Just a few of my favorites:
Don’t save up the good stuff (fancy wine, or china) for that rare occasion that will never happen; instead use them whenever you can.
You can become the world’s best in something primarily by caring more about it than anyone else.
Think in terms of decades, and act in terms of days.
The highest form of wealth is deciding you have enough.
Gurwinder has two to offer in this links post. First, he gives us his quarterly 30 Useful Concepts. I liked these among others:
The more similar two choices seem, the less the decision should matter, yet the harder it is to choose between them. As a result, we often spend the most time on the decisions that matter least.
We assume winners have the best advice, but those who win rarely examine why they won, while those who lose often regretfully dwell on their mistakes. So you’ll often obtain the best advice on winning not from winners but from losers.
Second, in the spirit of Kevin Kelly above he gives us 23 Truths he wishes he knew at age 23. These stood out to me:
Few things make you stupider than the belief that you need to have an opinion on everything.
No one is paying as much attention to you as you are. People are too concerned with how they appear to others to care much about how you appear to them.
A lot of the time your feelings are invalid and you should feel differently.
Your future-self would do anything to be you again. Treasure the time you have like you treasure the good old days, because today and tomorrow are the future’s good old days.
The last of the four links is a bit different than the others. Rather than a list, it is a relatively singular piece of advice from Freya India writing at GIRLS. Her basic message is that we don’t need to document everything in our lives. The extended message is to not get caught up in the influencer rat race. Notice how this passage below harkens back to Truths #3 & #23 from Gurwinder above:
Aspire to be different! Aspire to be someone who gets so caught up in the moment they forget to share it; who protects their personal life while everyone else hands theirs over so freely; who can see the value in a moment without needing strangers to validate it for them. Be someone rare. It’s a cruel trick of modern life to convince us that everyone cares what we’re doing, all the time; that everyone is deeply invested in how we live and how we identify and how we feel. Seriously believing that is enough to make anyone mentally ill. And looking at famous influencers with fans who are that invested, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
Be your own person including building your own lists like these above. Take, borrow, meld these into your own as needed. That is one last piece of advice from me for you. In other words, be independent!
Happy Fourth of July!
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