Here are three pieces of advice that emerge often in discussions of success from older folks:

BE OPEN

When you first get into the workforce, you’re used to having a predictable schedule of advancement. Every school year, you move on to another grade. You have a graduation after high school and another after college. It almost feels like a video game in which there is a clear set of levels to move through.

Once you get into the work world, that changes in two ways. The time schedule is no longer clear, and there is no set path that everyone follows from one position to another. So, you have to abandon the sense that there are going to be regular promotions and that you will work your way up an invisible corporate ladder.

More importantly, you have no idea where your opportunities will come from. That means you have to be open to things that come up along the way—even if they weren’t things you envisioned for yourself. This is advice that I hear repeatedly from successful people. I wrote about it in my book Bring Your Brain to Work. More recently, I heard this advice being given by Carolyn Miles on a podcast hosted by MBA Chic.

BE KIND

There is an odd undercurrent among people striving in many businesses that the most ruthless people are the ones who make it. Yet, most successful people will point out that they succeeded because of the relationships they developed, which were nurtured by kindness and generosity. After all, when you treat someone badly in a business context, they will never want to work with you again, but when you help them to achieve their goals, you have helped to create a colleague for life.

The management guru Peter Drucker wrote a lot about the importance of generosity for success. He was an early advocate of developing great workplace relationships in an era of business known for being impersonal. This advice continues to ring true today. Most people who have had successful careers can point to people who have given them a lift them along the way. You will only get that helping hand when you have invested in those relationships.

BE CURIOUS

Work is busy. There are times when it can feel as though you only have time to plow through the items on your To-Do list. As a result, you may feel like there is no time to learn new things or to pay attention to anything that isn’t relevant to serving customers, clients, and colleagues right now.

When successful people look back on their careers, though, they realize that much of the knowledge they needed to succeed involved things that they learned without knowing why they learned them at the time. Instead, they were just curious about the world. The knowledge they acquired then served them well. Prolific inventor James Dyson makes this point. His ability to generate new ideas was driven in large part by his wide-ranging base of knowledge that he built through his curiosity.

That means you need to make time for learning new things inside of a schedule that is crammed with work. Make sure you’re always reading something (or perhaps listening to an audiobook). Pick topics that are interesting to you, but not necessarily ones that you already know a lot about. You’ll be surprised at the number of times that something you just learned about turns out to help you solve a problem you’re struggling with.