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[13knave]

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you. - Kevin Kelly

• 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.

• Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.

• Don’t be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.

• Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?”, until there is no more.

• A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

• Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

• 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.

• Don’t trust all-purpose glue.

• Reading to your children regularly will bond you together and kickstart their imaginations.

• Never use a credit card for credit. The only kind of credit, or debt, that is acceptable is debt to acquire something whose exchange value is extremely likely to increase, like in a home. The exchange value of most things diminishes or vanishes the moment you purchase them. Don’t be in debt to losers.

• Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.

• 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.

• Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.

• 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.

• Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works.

• The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.

• Promptness is a sign of respect.

• When you are young spend at least 6 months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your “worst” lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won’t be afraid of the worst case scenario.

• Trust me: There is no “them”.

• The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested.

• Optimize your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.

• To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

• The Golden Rule will never fail you. It is the foundation of all other virtues.

• If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you’re done with it, don’t put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.

• Saving money and investing money are both good habits. Small amounts of money invested regularly for many decades without deliberation is one path to wealth.

• To make mistakes is human. To own your mistakes is divine. Nothing elevates a person higher than quickly admitting and taking personal responsibility for the mistakes you make and then fixing them fairly. If you mess up, fess up. It’s astounding how powerful this ownership is.

• Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

• You can obsess about serving your customers/audience/clients, or you can obsess about beating the competition. Both work, but of the two, obsessing about your customers will take you further.

• Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up.

• Separate the processes of creation 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 judgement.

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

• Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

• Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.

• This is true: It’s hard to cheat an honest man.

• When an object is lost, 95% of the time it is hiding within arm’s reach of where it was last seen. Search in all possible locations in that radius and you’ll find it.

• You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

• If you lose or forget to bring a cable, adapter or charger, check with your hotel. Most hotels now have a drawer full of cables, adapters and chargers others have left behind, and probably have the one you are missing. You can often claim it after borrowing it.

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

• There is no limit on better. Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.

• Be prepared: When you are 90% done any large project (a house, a film, an event, an app) the rest of the myriad details will take a second 90% to complete.

• When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.

• Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.

• For every dollar you spend purchasing something substantial, expect to pay a dollar in repairs, maintenance, or disposal by the end of its life.

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

• When crisis and disaster strike, don’t waste them. No problems, no progress.

• On vacation go to the most remote place on your itinerary first, bypassing the cities. You’ll maximize the shock of otherness in the remote, and then later you’ll welcome the familiar comforts of a city on the way back.

• 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.

• Don’t say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly, because eventually they will read it.

• If you desperately need a job, you are just another problem for a boss; if you can solve many of the problems the boss has right now, you are hired. To be hired, think like your boss.

• Art is in what you leave out.

• Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will.

• Rule of 7 in research. You can find out anything if you are willing to go seven levels. If the first source you ask doesn’t know, ask them who you should ask next, and so on down the line. If you are willing to go to the 7th source, you’ll almost always get your answer.

• How to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.

• Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.

• 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.

• Eliminating clutter makes room for your true treasures.

• You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.

• Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time.

• A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.

• Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.

• Learn how to take a 20-minute power nap without embarrassment.

• Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is “master something, anything”. Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.

• I’m positive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong, and I try really hard to identify what it is that I am wrong about today.

• Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don’t have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.

• The universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success. This will be much easier to do if you embrace this pronoia.

[13knave]

Perdita

Soon this will become our life together and we have to live in the world like everyone else. We have to go to work, have children, make homes, make dinner, make love and the world is low on goodness these days so our lives may come to nothing. We will have dreams but will they come true?

Maybe we’ll forget that we were the site where the miracle happened. The place of pilgrimage that fell into disuse, overgrown with weeds, run-down and neglected. Maybe we we won’t stay together. Maybe life is too hard anyway. Maybe love is just for the movies.

Maybe we’ll hurt each other so much that we will deny that what happened happened. We’ll find an alibi to prove that we were never there. Those people didn’t exist.

Maybe, one night, when the weather is bad and you are holding my wrists too tight, I’ll take a torch and go for a walk in the rain, my collar up against the wind, and the stars not there in the dark, and a bird startles out of the hedge, and there’s the gleam of puddles under battery-light, and further off the sound of the main raid, but here the sound of the night and my footsteps and my breathing.

Maybe then I will remember that, although history repeats itself and we always fall, and I am a carrier of history whose brief excursion into time leaves no mark, I have known something worth knowing, wild and unlikely and against every rote.

Like a pocket of air in an upturned boat.

Love. The size of it. The scale of it. Unimaginable. Vast. Your love for me. My love for you. Our love for another. Real. Yes. Though I find my way by flashlight in the dark, I am witness and evidence of what I know: this love.

The atom and jot of my span.

- Jeantte Winterson, The Gap of Time

[13knave]

Getting old happens suddenly. It's like swimming out to sea and realising that the shore you're making for isn't the shore where you started out.

Jeanette Winterson

[13knave]

I don't regret it but I can't forgive it. I did the right thing but it was wrong. ... It may sound like we're just tossing the words around here, but there is a big difference. He means it is wrong to take a life but that I did it to end her suffering. I believe it was right to take her life. We were married. We were one flesh. But I did it for the wrong reason and I knew that soon enough. I didn't do it to end my wife's pain; I did it to end mine own.

[13knave]

What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past? I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What's the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remmbering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

Jeanette Winterson

[13knave]

You think you're living in the present but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

Jeanette Winterson

[13knave]

I get tired of “under 40” lists. Show me someone who got their PhD at 60 after losing everything. Give me the 70-year-old debut novelist who writes from a lifetime of love and grief. Give me calloused hands and tender hearts.

Doug Murano

[13knave]

There’s No Such Thing as Normal

There’s no such thing as normal, only the reality created by your environment. This is why we disagree, when my perception, understanding of reality clashes with yours.

The CEO who delegates would hardly understand why the executive need to take double the time to complete certain tasks on the ground.

A mother of one with a supportive extended family would wonder at how a single mother of seven could survive at half her salary.

A family-run company would operate differently from one run by a group of teens.

Reality differs. 

What we can do is share stories with each other, and hopefully by listening. We may understand.

[13knave]

[13knave]

John Cassavetes: “Say what you are. Not what you would like to be. Not what you have to be. Just say what you are. And what you are is good enough.”

[13knave]

"To See a World..."

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To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour. 

  A Robin Redbreast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons

Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State.

A Horse misus’d upon the Road

Calls to Heaven for Human blood.

  Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fiber from the Brain does tear. 

He who shall train the Horse to War

Shall never pass the Polar Bar.

The Beggar’s Dog and Widow’s Cat,

Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.

The Gnat that sings his Summer song

Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.

  The poison of the Snake and Newt

Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.

A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the Lies you can invent.

  It is right it should be so;

Man was made for Joy and Woe;

And when this we rightly know

Thro’ the World we safely go. 

  Every Night and every Morn

Some to Misery are Born.

Every Morn and every Night

Some are Born to sweet delight.

Some are Born to sweet delight,

Some are Born to Endless Night. 

[13knave]

“People are starving.

They may not know it because they're being fed mass-produced garbage. The packaging is colourful and it's loud but it's being produced in the same factories that make pop-tarts and iPads by people sitting around thinking what can we do what can we do to get people to buy more of these. And they're very good at their jobs but that's what it is you're getting because that's what they're making they're selling you something and

the world is built on this now, politics and government are built on this, corporations are built on this, interpersonal relationships are built on this

and we're starving all of us and we're killing each other and we're hitting each other and we're calling each other liars and evil because it's all become marketing and we want to win because we're lonely and empty and scared and we're led to believe winning will change all that but there is no winning. What can be done?

Say who you are. Really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost someone not yet born, someone who won't be born for five hundred years.

Your writing will be a record of your time it can't help but be but more importantly if you're honest about who you are you'll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope and it's done so for me and I have to keep rediscovering it, it's profound importance in my life give that to the world rather than selling something to the world don't allow yourself to be tricked into thinking that the way things are is the way the world must work and that in the end selling is what everyone must do try not to the world needs you it doesn't need you at a party having read a book about how to appear smart at parties these books exist and they're tempting but resist falling into that trap, the world needs you at the party starting real conversations saying I don't know, being kind. “

- Charlie Kaufman

[13knave]

“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.”  ― Federico Fellini

[13knave]

Contributed by Anthony Elder

[13knave]

Reasons Why Being A Nature Photographer Is The Best Job In The World.

[13knave]

"What is it about society that disappoints you so much?"

Oh, I don’t know. Is it that we collectively thought that Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions of the backs of children? Or maybe it’s that it feels that all our heroes are counterfeit.The world itself is just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary bullshit, masquerading as insight. Our social media faking as intimacy.

Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things. Our property. Our money. I’m not saying anything new, we all know why we do this. Not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend. Because we’re cowards.

Fuck society.

[13knave]

Sorry, Yao Xiao