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At age 69, with perhaps too much time spent pondering what’s important, and trying out ideas on clients, friends, and myself, I offer 11 life principles that I deeply believe are true, important, and too-little used.
Spend time with people who bring out the best in you. Sure, you may be forced to spend time with coworkers or family members who are deleterious to you but, when you have discretion, rather than succumb to a rescuer fantasy or feeling that you deserve to be treated poorly, spend as much time as you can with people who bring out the best in you. Or be alone. Indeed, solo time can be among the most rewarding and pleasurable. The statement, “Man is a social animal” is an oversimplification.
Be picky about who you date and much moreso before marrying, despite any social pressure to marry. It’s infinitely better to stay single than to be trapped in an even just mediocre marriage, let alone a bad one.
Time is treasure. Many people treat it like dross. Many of the people who are most satisfied with their life and who are most contributory tend to make the most of every hour, even every minute. Sure, they spend some time unproductively but they make the choice to do so consciously. It’s central that you be time-conscious: Decide whether an activity is a wise use of your time or whether this is a time that you want to be unproductive.
Procrastination is a career and personal life decimator. It’s like running a race while wearing leg weights. Keeping procrastination under control comes down to forcing yourself, yes forcing yourself, to take baby steps forward. Take that onerous task you’re tempted to procrastinate, break it into baby steps, and take the first one.
If you need more structure, try the Pomodoro Technique: Work for 20 minutes, break for 5, work for 20, break for 5, work for 20, break for 10. That constitutes a “Pomodoro.” After four Pomodoros, take a long break. "Pomodoro" is “tomato” in Italian. The technique was named after those tomato-shaped kitchen timers but, of course, you can use any timer including the one in your phone. Or use one of the Pomodoro apps.
Choose your career early. After just modest exploration, the benefits of additionally keeping your options open are usually outweighed by the time you could have spent becoming expert as well as by the likelihood that after all that exploratory time, you won’t have found anything sufficiently better. As they say about answering multiple-choice questions, your first instinct is usually right. Except within broad categories (e.g., people vs word vs data-centric careers), career success and happiness are more about the diligence you apply to your career than to which career you apply it.
Learn outside of school. School is a bizarrely inefficient way to learn anything: You’re being taught a mass of information selected by an often theory-rich, practicality-light professor, only a small percentage of which you likely perceive of value, and an even smaller percentage of which you’ll remember and use in your life. And a course’s pace is often too fast or too slow.
A comprehensive nationwide evaluation of the learning accrued in a college education reveals frighteningly little freshman-to-senior growth: More than 1/3 of seniors had grown not at all in the tested areas (writing and critical thinking), remarkable given all the time and money.
Yes, the piece of paper that colleges dispense has value, even is a necessity for some careers, but its value is often outweighed by the cost in time, money, and crucially, in opportunity cost: what you otherwise could have been doing with the time and money: for example, self-study of articles and videos unearthed in a YouTube search, augmented perhaps by a tutor, highly rated short courses offered on LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Udacity, and Coursera, learning on the job and/or with a mentor.
Spend modestly, especially on big things: housing, education, and cars, but also on vacations, clothes, furniture, etc. The benefit and pleasure of the extra spend are too small relative to the costs: reduced financial security, eliminating enjoyable but not lucrative career options from consideration, increased ethical temptation, and distraction from what’s more likely to contribute to the life well-led: making a difference. And spending on the non-essential is addictive, requiring an ever-larger dose to get shopper’s high.
Accept your weight. Most dieters gain it all back and often more—dangerous. And dieting is no fun nor is seeing the weight creep back and being unable to fit into the new skinny clothes you bought. Yes, try to eat moderately but avoid diets. If your BMI is more than 30 or you have other potentially relevant health conditions, your situation may be more complicated and so a talk with your health practitioner may well be wise.
Do not do drugs, and yes that includes marijuana. Weed is far more dangerous than the Big-Tobacco-funded or cheered PR campaigns would have us believe. (See reviews of the literature that are not sponsored by the tobacco industry, for example, THIS and THIS.
Think twice before expressing politically incorrect views, especially regarding race, gender, ethnicity, and immigration. We’re living in inordinately censorious and censurious times. People who disagree with you too often exert powerful retribution, even, for example, on Joe Biden, distorting things he said years ago in a perfectly defensible context. But that context is often inadequately reported or is downplayed. Instead, some people and yes some in the media use, for example, the free and easy yet powerful social media to assault a person with weaponized words such as “sexist” and most powerful today, “racist.”
Compete with your best self, not with others. Focusing on keeping up with the Joneses is foolish. Their stature may be unattainable or, most Joneses aren't worth keeping "up" with. Far better to spend the time trying to be your best self.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
