Excellent Advice for Living
Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
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3.8 • 6 Ratings
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
“A shorthand manual for living with kindness, decency, and generosity of spirit.” —Maria Popova
“I love aphorisms, proverbs, and Secrets of Adulthood . . . Excellent Advice for Living includes wise, practical advice for life.” —Gretchen Rubin, via Twitter
“One hundred years from now, when so much of the nonsense of our age is forgotten, people will still remember Kevin Kelly and his wisdom.” —Seth Godin
“All will benefit from [Kelly's] idiosyncratic wit and wry humor.” —People
Wise, practical, optimistic life advice from author and leading technology thinker Kevin Kelly
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. To his surprise, Kelly had more to say than he thought, and kept adding to the advice over the years, compiling a life’s wisdom into these pages.
Kelly’s timeless advice covers an astonishing range, from right living to setting ambitious goals, optimizing generosity, and cultivating compassion. He has wisdom for career, relationships, parenting, and finances, and gives guidance for practical matters ranging from travel to troubleshooting.
Excellent Advice for Living is aimed primarily at young people, but speaks to all ages. This is the ideal companion for anyone seeking to navigate life with grace and creativity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful entry, Kelly (The Inevitable), a founding editor of Wired, collects pearls of wisdom for all stages of life. When he turned 68, the author began what would become a birthday tradition: compiling bits of advice for his adult children, eventually coming up with the 450 snippets collected here that touch on finances, parenting, relationships, self-awareness ("A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others") and patience ("Become just a teeny bit better than you were last year. Repeat every year"). Some sayings are easily committed to memory ("Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong") while others invite further contemplation ("We are not a body that carries a soul. We are a soul that is assigned a body"). The author doesn't cite specific sources, acknowledging that he's paraphrasing, and doubts any of the advice "is truly original." Despite a tendency toward the moralizing ("It doesn't matter how many people don't appreciate you or your work. The only thing that counts is how many do"), the entries are genuinely thought-provoking, and Kelly's earnestness is leavened with refreshing humor ("Be nice to your children because they are going to choose your nursing home"). The result is an unapologetically upbeat offering.
