39 Life Learnings People Ignore at Their Peril
#1 Don't take shortcuts. Why? Because they don't exist. Despite what we think and what others may tell us, there are no shortcuts in life.
#2 Pay it forward. If someone helps you, pay it forward by helping someone else. Don’t underestimate the power of small acts of kindness.
#3 Check your vibe & follow your feels. Pay attention to what your gut is telling you. Intuition is real. If something feels off, it very likely is.
#4 Focus on earning long-term respect ＞ short-term popularity. Stop hedging. Stop people-pleasing. Play the long game for the BIG PRIZES or the short game for NONE.
#5 Focus on right HERE, right NOW. Everything you want to achieve starts with what you do TODAY. We can plan for the future, but ONLY WHAT WE DO TODAY CREATES IT.
#6 Life isn't fair. If you're waiting for things to be fair you'll wait forever. We already know who and what life favors and if you're reading this, there's a very high likelihood IT'S YOU.
#7 Bad experiences always make for the best stories. Time heals most wounds. What's painful, terrifying, or unbearable in the moment is often something we learn from or laugh about in the future.
#8 Say 'YES' to everything when you're young and 'NO' most things when you're older. When we're young we need more options. YES gives us options. When we're older, very few things over 5, 10, 20-year time horizons matter.
#9 Nothing is more important than our HEALTH. We all hear this all the time, but most of us ignore it. At least until something happens. We're living in an unprecedented time of mass preventable chronic illnesses in people both young and old. It's heartbreaking.
#10 Balance the 'DOING' and 'BEING' mind. The doing mind gets things done and achieves goals. The being mind accepts the current reality without feeling the pressure to change it. Finding the right balance between them is an important life skill worth mastering.
#11 Feel your pain, don't run from it. Life is hard. Sure. But, if we learn to make friends instead of masters of our negative emotions, it can be so much less hard. I get that this is counterintuitive, but I promise you, if you can find the courage to sit with your pain, you'll have less pain.
#12 Show up. ALWAYS. CONSISTENTLY. Consistency, reliability, honesty, and focused effort are the keys to long-lasting, beautiful, and rich relationships, especially with children. Show up for kids ALWAYS, intimate partners and spouses ALWAYS, partnerships and professional relationships ALWAYS.
#13 Only be around people who want what's best for you. The venture capitalist Paul Graham, cautions us to ruthlessly prune the bullshit. Those who don’t want what’s best for us — and there are more of them than you think — are bullshit. Be ruthless about excising these toxic and negative people from your life.
#14 No one knows what they’re doing. Everywhere we look we see people signaling certainty and confidence. Look closer. Most of this performative. No one — literally NO ONE — has it all figured out. All of us are confused, uncertain, unclear, and unsure about many, many things. It's supposed to be this way.
#15 It’s NOT about you. We all take far too many things too personally. There's much peace and contentment to be had by finally learning and understanding that it's not about you. The truth is that most people are so consumed with their own life and their own problems that they hardly know, remember, or even care about what you’re doing.
#16 Everyone has something to teach you. EVERYONE. In fact, time and again the best, most profound advice and life learnings come from the least likely people at the strangest of times. This is always a welcome and pleasant surprise. So talk less. Let go of those initial judgments. Listen more. You might learn something very important.
#17 Choose your response instead of letting it be chosen for you. The good news — it's our choice alone how we respond to people and circumstances. The bad news — so few of us bother to make the choice before us. Instead, we allow ourselves to be puppet-mastered by circumstances, rather than calmly calculating our response to them.
#18 Careers don’t exist. The whole idea of a professional careers is another area where our cultural obsessions don't serve us. We must stop worrying about the narrative and trajectory of our careers. Instead, pursue your interests. Take care of your needs. Adapt to new circumstances. And, be willing to reinvent yourself whenever necessary.
#19 What you do is THE THING. This one is a little different than do as I do, not as I say because this one is about YOU, not THEM. Ultimately, we are defined by what WE DO, not by what WE SAY or what OTHERS SAY or what OTHERS DO. Forget about the other guy. Focus on YOU and know that fancy words don’t make up for a sloppy character.
#20 Choose optimism. Pessimism is easier. Pessimism is more persuasive. Pessimism sells more and gets more clicks. BUT, you already know that easier doesn't get you anywhere worth going. Only harder and more uncomfortable does. Only optimism in the face of difficultly and intense challenges motivates us enough to find a way forward.
#21 Progress is NOT LINEAR. All the get better, do better, be better industries want us to believe that we need to improve all the time. Yes, of course, we should want to improve over time, but life isn't an always, all-the-time thing. Life doesn't work or progress linearly. Sometimes, the best thing we can do is WAIT, CHILL, TAKE TIME, or SIT IT OUT.
#22 Inner peace ＞ external achievement. How many successful people do you know that are miserable? Same. Somehow, someway, we need to allow this overwhelming body of evidence to convince us that no amount of achievement will ever give us inner peace. We need to learn how to be at peace with ourselves, despite achievement or lack thereof.
#23 Big plans and big narratives are not your friend. These things may sound good and make us feel big, but eventually they turn on us. To do anything, to learn anything, or to excel at anything, simply pick a direction, make a bit of progress every day, and just keep going. What you'll see is that tiny daily actions, consistently over time, compound in remarkable ways
#24 Stop sweating decisions. Some decisions are one-way doors. Most are not. Stop obsessing about the “right” decision. Instead, define the problem, list the potential solutions, choose a path, and GO. Soon enough you'll know if it was the wrong decision. If it was, STOP, define the problem, list the potential solutions, choose a path, and GO. Rinse, Repeat. Rinse, Repeat. Rinse, Repeat.
#25 Slow the f#ck down. It's such a bummer to waste all that precious time only to realize that the thing — the specific conversation, the specific experience, the specific life phase — is WHAT LIFE IS instead of the thing you rip through in order to get to your life more quickly. NO! Please give some thought to this. The thing is the thing. The thing is life, not an obstacle to getting to life any faster.
#26 Be grateful for what you don’t have. Things can always be worse. Much worse. Like so much worse than you can possibly imagine, that I pray you never have to. Despite knowing this, many of us still obsess over those things we want but don't have. OK, fine. If we're so stuck on what we don't have, maybe it's time to be grateful for all the horrible and horrific things we also don’t have and hopefully never will.
#27 ACTION & PROGRESS beget MOTIVATION. The findings from the science of motivation were surprising. What we learned is that motivation is unreliable and unpredictable. We have much smaller reserves of motivation than anyone predicted. And, (biologically) we can't increase motivation by just wishing for it. Motivation, like everything else, is a process. What we also learned is the two most effective ways to increase motivation is to take action and make progress.
#28 Ignore most advice. Think carefully about this one. When we ask for advice (and even when we don't) what are most people likely to tell us? They tell us what THEY would do. Fine, but we aren’t them, what they would do is often wrong, and their advice is loaded with bias. We need to learn to trust our own intuitions. Of course, it makes great sense to check in with someone we trust. Those who we known will take the time to step into our shoes, as well as those who actually want the best outcomes for us. Unfortunately, most don't.
#29 READ. Flat out reading is one of the most important things we can do. Unfortunately, a vanishingly small number of people like and still enjoy reading. Most people don't get that reading gives us the rare opportunity to transcend the limitations of our direct experience. It's the only thing we can do to directly tap into centuries of knowledge, wisdom, and experience. Those who don't or won't read may want to consider the facts — people who read often have a scientifically proven outsized advantage in both life and work than those who don't.
#30 Listening to the birds is NOT for the birds. This one is about NOTICING and ATTENTION. After all, we are what we pay attention to. Birds are chirping everywhere all around us. Can you hear them? Did you even know they were there? NO. So many of us are trapped inside our skulls and wrapped up with our inner dramas that we don’t even hear the birds. And we never will unless we train ourselves to tune into the present moment. In our devastating pursuit for contentment, it’s the birds who will let us know when we’re on the right track.
#31 Write about things that pique your interest and journal about your life. There's so many delicious big and little moments in life. Most of these we forget about. When we write about the interesting things we've seen and experienced, as well as the many mundane details of our lives, we develop a narrative tapestry about our lives, through time, that is invaluable to us when we get older. Please don't miss out on this opportunity to look back at who you were and what you thought. It's really the only way to ever know how far you've come.
#32 Take a charitable view of others. We need a renaissance where this one's concerned. I used to not like most people. I didn't trust anyone. I thought most people were petty and full of crap and bad-intentioned. I WAS WRONG. Most people are good. They want the same things we all do. All of us, despite failing over and over, are trying their best. We gotta give people a break. And, if we aren't willing to do it for them, then the least we can do is do it ourselves. Taking a more charitable view of others makes our own lives easier and less stressful.
#33 Everything gets old. Life often feels like a series of diminishing returns. Beyond a certain point—more money, more fame, more prestige—more of anything doesn’t bring more happiness. We need to recognize when we’ve had enough. This idea is known as the hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation. It describes the human tendency to return quickly to a stable level of happiness, no matter what happens—whether major positive events or significant setbacks. The highs of happiness or the depths of sadness tend to fade, bringing us back to our personal baseline.
#34 Go for it. Try new things. Challenge yourself. Nike def had this one right — JUST DO IT. If you're worried about what those sitting on the sidelines are thinking, STOP and remember there's a reason they're on the sidelines and you're in the game. The great gonzo journalist — Hunter S. Thompson — had this right when he said Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather a skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'WOW! WHAT A RIDE!'
#35 Desire is dangerous. How can that be? Hear me out. Most people think that wanting something is the prerequisite, first step to getting it. This isn't true. Desire matters, it has a role, but it's also dangerous for several reasons. FIRST, desire is a contract—an agreement—we make with ourselves to be unhappy about something we don't have. That's not cool; true, but not cool. SECOND, what can happen, and what happens quite often, is that our unhappiness over not having a particular thing we want builds and builds, and we start doing things we shouldn't to get things we think we need. Desire may feel exciting, even motivating, but unchecked, it can lead us down dangerous paths.
#36 Choose COURAGE ＞ COMFORT every single time. Instinctively, we all understand the wisdom behind this one, but a majority of us still fall short. We opt for and take the comfort every time. Tim Ferriss nailed this when he said, A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. I love this quote. Growth and progress require confronting challenging situations and conversations head-on. Avoiding them gets us nowhere. Only by engaging in these difficult dialogues and addressing problems directly can we even begin to remove all the conflicts, obstacles, and impediments standing in the way of achieving our goals.
#37 Stop trying to feel happy. Everywhere you look someone is selling us a shortcut hack to happiness or some other version of enlightenment. Our culture promises us that this happiness is attainable and just around the corner, if only… STOP! First of all, happiness isn't a destination we arrive at; rather, it's a wholly subjective, constantly evolving, and only ever temporary state we sometimes feel, until we don't. It's important to remember that we evolved for two reasons ONLY — to SURVIVE and REPRODUCE — and happiness isn't one of them. We're way better off prioritizing things we're naturally evolved to do and that we can also feel good about — our health, relationships, standing amongst our peers, etc.
#38 Respect and listen to your elders. Older people are life's greatest untapped resource of wisdom, knowledge, experience, and advice. Younger people, collectively, who think older people, collectively, are clueless and out of step, always makes me wonder who dropped the bad acid. 20-year olds ignore the advice and experiences of 50-year olds — someone who's lived 2.5x longer and been an adult 30x longer — at their grave peril. It's not even a logical comparison — some life experience vs. some more life experience. NO — this is ZERO vs. TONS! Interestingly, cultures outside of the U.S., especially throughout Asia and much of South America, get this. These cultures are built and thrive on the experiences of elders.
#39 Say 'sorry' more not less. There's a strange idea floating around X-verse that you should never apologize, that it leaves you vulnerable to your words being used against you in the future. WTF? When you make a mistake, when you screw up, TAKE RESPONSIBILITY. Own it. Make a genuine apology to the person you slighted. Commit to being better in the future. I've always found it strange that people think it's easier to NOT apologize or that they are too prideful to do so. One, apologies are liberating. You feel better the second you apologize. Two, apologies build stronger bonds and better bridges. Apologies are one of the most important facets of strong and healthy relationships. Thirdly, screw up enough times and ignore to clean up the mess you've made, and you're likely to find yourself with no one to apologize to at all.