Kevin Kelly wrote down the advice he wished he’d known when he was younger. Danny Meyer built a restaurant empire by putting employees first. Bill Gurley discovered that great careers come from pursuing genuine interests. Sam Zell found opportunity wherever supply and demand were out of balance. Stephen Schwarzman built Blackstone by repeatedly asking, “Why not?” Success looked completely different for each of these people, yet all five found it by ignoring conventional wisdom. Kelly ignored comparison. Meyer put employees before customers. Gurley chose interests over prestige. Zell found opportunities where others weren’t looking. Schwarzman kept asking, “Why not?” That idea runs through my May reading list. For more timeless lessons, check out my reading list archive. Let’s start with Kevin Kelly and the advice he wrote for his children.
Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier
As he approached 70, Kevin Kelly began writing down the advice he wished he had known earlier in life for his adult children.
The list kept growing. Eventually, it became Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.
The advice resonates because it addresses enduring human problems: attention, relationships, work, money, purpose, and time.
Lessons that stayed with me:
- Different is better
- The best way to learn anything is to teach it
- Don’t let someone else’s urgency become your emergency
- Aim to be respected, not liked
- You don’t need more time; you need more focus
- What you do on bad days matters more than what you do on the good days
- To keep succeeding, focus on the process instead of the outcome
- The greatest killer of happiness is comparison
- Invest small amounts consistently over long periods of time
- Half of being educated is learning what you can ignore
- Do more work that feels like play and looks like work to others
For more on Kevin Kelly and his advice, read:
📚 Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier
Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
Danny Meyer opened Union Square Cafe in his mid-twenties with a good idea and a few investors. He later opened Gramercy Tavern and eventually helped build Shake Shack into a global brand.
In Setting the Table, Meyer shares the lessons behind his philosophy of Enlightened Hospitality.
At its core, Enlightened Hospitality is the belief that exceptional customer experiences begin with exceptional treatment of employees.
A few lessons that stuck with me:
- Prioritize your team first
- Personalize the customer experience
- Give employees clear, honest feedback to help them grow
- The Five A’s of service recovery: acknowledge the error, apologize, act to fix it, address the customer’s concerns, and add generosity to make it right
For more on Meyer, his restaurants, and Enlightened Hospitality:
📚 Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business
Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love
Bill Gurley took a tech job after college. On paper, it looked perfect. He hated it. Eventually, he found his way into venture capital instead.
That tension sits at the center of Runnin’ Down a Dream, a book about choosing genuine interest over comfort, prestige, or convention.
Gurley argues that great careers are built through curiosity, apprenticeship, and decades of compounding effort. He uses stories from people like Danny Meyer and Sam Hinkie to show what long-term success actually looks like.
A few principles that stayed with me:
- Chase subjects you can’t stop thinking about
- Build technical mastery through years of deliberate practice
- Surround yourself with ambitious and talented people
- Put yourself where the best work in your field is happening
- Treat rejection as part of the process
- View your career as a long-term apprenticeship
For more on Gurley and building a meaningful career:
📚 Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love
Am I Being Too Subtle? Straight Talk From a Business Rebel
Self-made billionaire Sam Zell saw what others missed: opportunity in overlooked markets.
Zell ignored conventional wisdom, absorbed information relentlessly, and trusted his judgment.
Am I Being Too Subtle? is part business memoir, part investing philosophy, and part argument for independent thinking.
Key lessons that stuck with me include:
- Reputation is your most important asset
- Build a tolerance for rejection
- Simplicity is a competitive advantage
- Speed and certainty win deals
- Integrity is keeping your word
- Structure situations with asymmetric upside
- Opportunity exists where supply and demand are out of balance
- Some of the best deals are the ones you don’t do
- Liquidity creates value
- Understand people’s motivations before depending on them
For more on Zell and what he learned building businesses, read:
📚 Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel
What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence
Stephen Schwarzman is the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager.
What It Takes shows how he built Blackstone and offers lessons you can apply to your own work.
As a child, he folded handkerchiefs in his father’s linen shop.
Eventually, strong grades and athletic success helped him earn admission to Yale. After Yale, he started his career at DLJ before moving to Lehman Brothers, where he rose to lead the mergers and acquisitions group.
After leaving Lehman, Schwarzman and his colleague Pete Peterson founded Blackstone to build a different kind of financial services firm.
Building anything, including Blackstone, wasn’t easy. That’s why Schwarzman focused on culture, hiring the best people, and implementing processes to evaluate risk.
His mantra throughout the book is simple: don’t lose money. He also stressed the importance of becoming the best in the world at what you do.
Schwarzman’s lessons apply to both business and life. The book sharpens your thinking about scale, risk, and opportunity.
Lessons that stuck with me include:
- Big goals are often no harder to achieve than small goals
- Inflection points matter most
- Be fearless with difficult problems
- Tell the truth
- Keep asking: why not
- Success comes from rare moments of opportunity
- Solve other people’s problems
- Put yourself in positions you’re not ready for
- Failure is a teacher
- Protect your reputation
- Find the right people
- Adapt when new information arrives
For more on Blackstone, Schwarzman, and his lessons, read:
📚 What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence
May Reading List
The people in this month’s reading list succeeded in different fields, but they arrived at similar conclusions.
Kevin Kelly argues that the best work feels like play and looks like work to everyone else. Danny Meyer built great restaurants by investing in people before profits. Bill Gurley found that meaningful careers come from pursuing interests you can’t stop thinking about. Sam Zell made fortunes by spotting imbalances others overlooked. Stephen Schwarzman built Blackstone by solving difficult problems and acting when opportunity appeared.
Their stories suggest that success is rarely about following a formula. In different ways, each of these builders succeeded by seeing the world differently from the people around them. The reward for independent thinking was not just success. It was finding opportunities that everyone else missed.
