Don’t compare yourself to others’ ideas of success; instead, cultivate your own unique definition of what success means for you, as external metrics can be misleading and prevent you from recognizing your own accomplishments.
Always choose kindness over being right, without exception, and understand that kindness is a strength, not a weakness. Cultivating kindness is cultivating a superpower that brings long-term benefits.
Adopt a long-term perspective in life, as patience and a long view lead to greater gains and allow you to overcome temporary setbacks. This frame changes everything, allowing for compounding benefits in relationships and overcoming mistakes.
Practice forgiveness not for the benefit of others, but as a gift to yourself, as it leads to personal healing and emotional well-being. This includes mentally accepting an apology you may never receive from another person.
Shift focus from accumulating achievements and external validation to cultivating and growing your character, as this is what truly matters and will be remembered. Attend funerals to observe that people remember what kind of person you were, not just your accomplishments.
Strive to fully become yourself by the end of your life, and contribute to creating tools and opportunities that enable others to do the same. This involves a lifelong journey of figuring out what you’re truly good at.
While your passions should align with you, strive for a purpose and meaning in life that is larger and exceeds your individual self, as humans crave being part of something bigger.
Use what you find irritating in others as a mirror to understand aspects of yourself, as these strong reactions often signal something fundamental about your own character or behavior.
Actively listen to people you disagree with or find offensive to discover truth in their beliefs, as this can offer practical benefits and prevent canceling others.
To have any chance of changing someone’s mind, first genuinely listen and understand their perspective and how they arrived at their beliefs, rather than using logic alone, as people cannot be reasoned out of notions they didn’t reason themselves into.
Before interacting with someone, especially when upset, imagine having a 20-year relationship with them; this long-term frame can transform the conversation and foster better outcomes. Avoid actions that jeopardize these compounding relationships.
Rely on friends, family, colleagues, and others to help you understand yourself and your potential, as self-discovery is difficult to achieve through introspection alone. Leverage them for tough decisions like when to persevere or quit.
Be cautious if your views on various topics are highly predictable from a single belief, as this suggests you might be under the sway of an ideology rather than thinking independently.
Always set deadlines for projects because they force you to eliminate non-essential elements, prevent perfectionism, and encourage innovative, ‘different’ solutions, which is often better than perfect.
Since perfecting a project can be infinite, control your output by setting a time limit and committing to doing your best work within that allocated time.
Engage in your craft or work on a regular, consistent basis, as this provides the freedom to fail and experiment, knowing you’ll have another opportunity to improve and produce more.
Allocate two-thirds of your time to optimizing existing successful approaches and one-third to exploring new, potentially inefficient things to foster continuous improvement and innovation.
Instead of striving to be the best, focus on being unique or ’the only,’ as this makes you harder to imitate and provides a strong advantage, especially in the age of AI.
Cultivate unpredictability in your actions and thoughts to make it difficult for AI to imitate or ‘fake’ you, which can be an advantage in the AI world where standard thinking will be free.
Reduce big, weighty advice into small, repeatable proverbs or capsules to make it easier to remember and turn into a habit for self-reminders.
Instead of giving verbal advice, model the behavior you want others (e.g., children) to adopt, as they are more likely to watch what you do than listen to what you say.
Prioritize spending twice as much time with your children as you think you need to, and half as much money, as time is what they will truly value.
Employ ‘self-distancing’ by imagining your future self looking back at your present actions to gain a different perspective and re-evaluate your current priorities.
Exercise extreme caution when attempting to eliminate ’evil,’ as historically, the greatest harms have often been committed in the name of eradicating perceived badness.