Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. Unwavering honesty will help seal in trust.

Don’t treat people as bad as they are. Treat them as good as you are.

It’s possible that a not-so-smart person who can communicate well can do much better than a super-smart person who can’t communicate well.That is good news because it is much easier to improve your communication skills than your intelligence.

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.

Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.

Instead of asking your child what they learned today, ask them who they helped today.

Don’t be the best. Be the only.

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

Learn how to learn from those you disagree with or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.

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

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.

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

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

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

Your ideal partner is not someone you never disagree with but someone you are glad to disagree with.

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

Pros make as many mistakes as amateurs; they’ve just learned how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.

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.

The foundation of maturity: Just because it’s not your fault doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility.

See that old person taking forever in line? That is the future you. Have patience.

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

Right now no matter your age these are your golden years. The good stuff will yield golden memories and the bad stuff will yield golden lessons.

A proper apology consists of conveying the 3 Rs: regret (genuine empathy with the other)responsibility (not blaming someone else)and remedy (your willingness to fix it).

The end is almost always the beginning of something better.

Looking ahead, focus on direction rather than destinations.Maintain the right direction and you’ll arrive at where you want to go.

If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. Hang out with, and learn from people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

If you want something to get done ask a busy person to do it.

When speaking to an audience pause frequently. Pause before you say something in a new way pause after you have said something you believe is important and pause as a relief to let listeners absorb details.

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

Every person you meet knows an amazing lot about something you know virtually nothing about. It won’t be obvious and your job is to discover what it is.