I discovered these wise gems in David Brooks NY Times column. He discovered them in Kevin Kelly’s Technium blog. Kevin is a tech journalist who shared these for his 68th, 69th and 70th birthdays
+ + +
When you have 90 percent of a large project completed, finishing up the final details will take another 90 percent.
If you can’t make up your mind between two options, flip a coin. Don’t decide based on which side of the coin came up. Decide based on your emotional reaction to which side came up.
A friend shares the advice: “Always make the call. If you’re disturbed or confused by something somebody did, always pick up the phone.”
There is no such thing as being “on time.” You are either late or you are early. Your choice.
Purchase a tourist guidebook to your hometown. You’ll learn a lot playing tourist once a year.
When you get invited to something in the future, ask yourself, Would I do this tomorrow?
Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
You cannot get smart people to work extremely hard just for money.
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.
Art is whatever you can get away with.
About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.
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.
Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points
Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.
Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
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.
Promptness is a sign of respect.
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.
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.
About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.
No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.
Don’t ever work for someone you don’t want to become.
Cultivate 12 people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.
Criticize in private, praise in public.
Immediately pay what you owe to vendors, workers, contractors. They will go out of their way to work with you first next time.
The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.”
Handy measure: the distance between your fingertips of your outstretched arms at shoulder level is your height.
Three things you need: The ability to not give up something till it works, the ability to give up something that does not work, and the trust in other people to help you distinguish between the two.
Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.
The best way to get a correct answer on the internet is to post an obviously wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you.
You’ll get 10x better results by elevating good behavior rather than punishing bad behavior, especially
in children and animals.
Spend as much time crafting the subject line of an email as the message itself because the subject line is often the only thing people read.
Don’t wait for the storm to pass; dance in the rain.
When checking references for a job applicant, employers may be reluctant or prohibited from saying anything negative, so leave or send a message that says, “Get back to me if you highly recommend this applicant as super great.” If they don’t reply take that as a negative.
Recent Comments