Excellent Advice for Living
Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier
Wired's founding editor distills a lifetime into hundreds of short, sharp aphorisms on how to live, work, and treat other people well.
On the eve of his seventieth birthday, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly began writing down bits of hard-won advice for his children. It grew into hundreds of tightly packed aphorisms on money, kindness, work, travel, and how to treat people. Some are practical, some philosophical, and nearly all fit on a single line. The result is a book to open at random, less a manual than a lifetime of pattern recognition compressed into pocket-sized wisdom.
Recommended by 2 People
Maria Popova
That is precisely what Kevin Kelly gathers in Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier (public library) — an herbarium of learnings that began as a list he composed on his 68th birthday for his own young-adult children, a list to which he kept adding with each lived year.
Daniel Pink
Video · February 2026
As an Amazon Associate, bookstoread.org earns from qualifying purchases. Links to Amazon on this page may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Spotted an error on this page? Tell us and we will fix it.