Yesterday I listened one of my favorite podcasts — Freakonomics Radio — and heard an interview with Kevin Kelly, one of the co-founders of Wired magazine. One of Kelly’s blog posts, “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,” had gone viral. He had posted it on the occasion of his birthday and intended it as a gift to young people in the form of lessons learned over his 68 years.
It’s easy to see why the list has proven so popular. Many of Kelly’s suggestions manage to fall in the sweet spot for life advice: not so obvious as to be boring, but also not so obscure as to be irrelevant or outlandish. Some of them resonated with me because they reflected my own life experience and seemed like advice I might have come up with, others because they were surprising but made sense when I thought about them. Here are some of my favorites:
- Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.
- Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.
- 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.
- 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.
- Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence to be believed.
- Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Hangout with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.
- When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself: would you accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.
- When someone is nasty, rude, hateful, or mean with you, pretend they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict.
In short, I recommend taking a look at the full list, and also listening to the interview.