Excellent Advice for Living

My notes

Listening well is a superpower.\ While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?” until there is no more.

A deadline prevents you from trying to make it perfect so you have to make it different.\ Different is better.

Prototype your life.\ Try stuff instead of making grand plans.

When you forgive others they may not notice but you will heal.\ Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.

A major part of travel is to leave stuff behind.\ The more you leave behind the further you will advance.

You can’t reason someone out of a notion that they didn’t reason themselves into.

Treating a person to a meal never fails and is so easy to do.\ It’s powerful with old friends and a great way to make new friends.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.

Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind be kind. No exceptions.\ Don’t confuse kindness with weakness.

We lack rites of passage.\ Create a memorable family ceremony when your child reaches legal adulthood between eighteen and twenty-one.\ This moment will become a significant touchstone in their life.

Don’t be the best. Be the only.

Everyone is shy.\ Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them; they are waiting for you to send them an email; they are waiting for you to ask them on a date.\ Go ahead.

The more you are interested in others the more interesting they’ll find you.\ To be interesting, be interested.

The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation.

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.

Expand your mind by thinking with your feet on a walk or with your hand in a notebook.\ Think outside your brain.

To move through a place you may not be permitted, act like you belong there.

Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated.\ It only poisons the hater.\ Release a grudge as if it were a poison.

“No” is an acceptable answer even without a reason.

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.

If you are not falling down occasionally you are just coasting.

Don’t be in haste.\ When you are in a hurry you are more easily conned or manipulated.

Forgiveness is accepting the apology you will never get

more generous than necessary.\ No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.\ There is no point to being the richest person in the cemetery

You need teachers, parents customers, fans, and friends because they will see who you are becoming before you will.

Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be.\ Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe.\ And you can get better at it.\ It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

When crises strike don’t waste them.\ No problems, no progress.

Art is in what you leave out.

That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult —if you don’t lose it.

If you are not embarrassed by your past self you have probably not grown up yet.

The important should be your king.\ Down with the tyranny of the urgent!

Superheroes and saints never make art.\ Only imperfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken.

The greatest rewards come from working on something that nobody has words for.\ If you possibly can work where there are no names for what you do.

The hard part in predicting the future is to forget everything you expect it to be.

Work to become, not to acquire.

Contemplating the weaknesses of others is easy; contemplating the weaknesses in yourself is hard but it pays a much higher reward.

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.

Ignore what others may be thinking of you because they aren’t thinking of you.

Writing down one thing you are grateful for each day is the cheapest possible therapy ever.

The work on any worthy project is endless, infinite.\ You cannot limit the work so you must limit your hours.\ Your time, not the work is the only thing you can manage.

You can reduce the annoyance of someone’s stupid belief by increasing your understanding of why they believe it.

If your goal does not have a schedule, it is a dream.

Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.

Speak confidently as if you are right but listen carefully as if you are wrong.

Your growth as a mature being is measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have.

Making art is not selfish; it’s for the rest of us.\ If you don’t do your thing you are cheating us.

Learn how to be alone without being lonely.\ Solitude is essential for creativity.

You’ll get 10 times better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior especially in children and animals.

Don’t wait for the storm to pass; dance in the rain.

When you have some success, the feeling of being an imposter can be real.\ Who am I fooling?\ But when you create things that only you with your unique talents and experience can do then you are absolutely not an imposter.\ You are the ordained.\ It is your destiny to work on things that only you can do.

When you don’t know how much to pay someone for a particular task ask them, “What would be fair?”\ and their answer usually is.

The only productive way to answer “What should I do now?”\ is to first tackle the question of “Who should I become?”

Art is whatever you can get away with.

Don’t compare your inside to someone else’s outside.

You see only 2% of another person and they see only 2% of you.\ Attune yourself to the hidden 98%.

Our descendants will achieve things that will amaze us yet a portion of what they will create could have been made with today’s materials and tools if we had had the imagination.\ Think bigger.

Do more of what looks like work to others but is play for you.

Pay attention to what you pay attention to.

You can really change someone’s life for the better simply by offering words of encouragement.

The main reason to produce something every day is that you must throw away a lot of good work to reach the great stuff.\ To let it all go easily you need to be convinced that there is “more where that came from.”\ You get that in steady production.

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.

Anger is not the proper response to anger.\ When you see someone angry you are seeing their pain.\ Compassion is the proper response to anger.

For a great payoff be especially curious about the things you are not interested in.

The purpose of listening is not to reply, but to hear what is not being said.

If your sense of responsibility is not expanding as you grow you are not really growing.

Embrace pronoia which is the opposite of paranoia.\ Choose to believe that the entire universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success.

Go with the option that opens up yet more options.

Re-visioning the ordinary is what art, literature, and comedy do.\ You can elevate mundane details into magical wonders simply by noticing them.

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.