Made a little book

 Kevin Kelly on making Excellent Advice for Living from Tim Ferriss podcast

But let’s zoom out. So I’m holding two copies of the book. One is very, very tiny. This is a prized possession, now. I’ve read it probably 12 times. I have many, many notes and there are all sorts of notes in here. Excellent Advice for Living. Now the tiny version I have says, “Seeds for contemplation,” which I also like. And then there’s the very beautiful cover of this galley that you handed to me just before we started recording. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. How did this come to be? What is the genesis story?

Kevin Kelly: So I would write down bits of advice to help me change my own behavior. I like to reduce something that I could say to myself, to repeat to myself, to remember something as a way of changing my behavior. And that kind of encapsulation and reduction to a little tiny sentence, for me, it was a handle to grab hold of it and bring it forth when I needed it. And an example would be if I know I have something in my household and I can’t find it, then when I finally do find it, I’d say to myself, when I’m getting ready to put it back, “Don’t put it back where I found it, put it back where I first looked for it.” So I had my flashlight, “Put it back where you first looked for it.” So I’m reminding myself that. And so I would start to write things down.

Another one would be if I’m invited to do a talk or go meet somebody or have coffee, whatever it is, I would say to myself, “Would I do this if it was tomorrow morning?” As kind of a filter to really make sure it passed that hurdle, because eventually it will be tomorrow morning and I have to think about it. And so I would say, “I got this invite. Well that’s kind of interesting, good. But would I do this tomorrow morning?” So making it into some portable way that I could remind myself very easily. And I start to get in the habit of writing these down and I realized a lot of it was advice that I wish I had known earlier.

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— for 70 years. I was giving it out. But it’s scattered around the internet. And I thought it would be really handy to have it in a book. So I made a prototype myself, just made a little book. I made five copies and I sent it around to see if it worked as a book. And this book also has my little doodles in it. And it worked. And so I sent it to a publisher, they loved it. They said they didn’t like the doodles, and so they said, “No art by you.” So it’s in a portable form. And actually I realized afterwards, although it was not in my head at the time, but it’s very tweetable.

These are tweets. And so they work at the attention span of a young person these days and they transmit well. 

I tried to make them as practical as possible, actionable, not conventional, positive, if at all possible, and short. “You can find no better medicine for your family than regular meals together without screens.”