OK, let me give this a shot...<p>In the past year or two, I have learned my greatest life lesson. As a lifelong high achiever, it was extremely counter-intuitive yet it was right in front of me all along. First, a little background...<p>In the past couple of years:<p><pre><code> - My father died.
- My aunt (and best friend) died.
- My cousin (who was really like my brother) died.
- My 19 year old cat died.
- We had our first ever family reunion.
- My mother's dimentia has turned her back into a child.
</code></pre>
Sure we all have great memories and are busy working at building even better futures, but ultimately it all boils down to:<p>All we have is now.<p>My pets have been trying to teach me this for years, if only I had listened. And now my mother is teaching me. They don't really remember yesterday. They don't care about tomorrow. But they really care about the moment. Intensely.<p>I have had to really slow down and let this sink in. When I visit my mother in her nursing home, we have a great time laughing, talking, visiting others, and of course, playing Jeopardy. We can't have the conversations we used to, so we just have new experiences, one time only, in the moment, and only for those who are there. We never talk about the past and she simply doesn't understand, "I'll see you tomorrow."<p>I haven't stopped building my future, but I no longer sacrifice the present in order to get there. I have learned that the process must be as enjoyable as the outcome. After all, the process is "now" and the outcome is just an instant in time.<p>It may sound cliche, but everyone should take inventory of all the good stuff in their lives (especially other people) and make the most of it <i>now</i>. You'll be surprised how quickly it'll be gone. Don't wait half your life to learn my most valuable counter-intuitive lesson.
Never help the cops. This includes never talking to the cops.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik</a> -- Part 1
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE</a> -- Part 2
"retirement is boring" is only true if the current way you spend your free time is boring. i love my free time and i know from experience that having more of it simply allows me to learn and achieve more of what i want. maybe these hobbies would become professional if they were full time, maybe not. people are different and spend their free time in different ways.<p>(wrt free time, i would say: stop procrastinating! i'm lucky, because i naturally prefer to work immediately and then be able to spend my free time exactly as i prefer, rather than wasting time and working under pressure near deadlines. if you can figure out how to trade your procrastination time for real pleasure, then you win both now and later.)
There's a class of situations where the more you want something, the less likely you are to get it.<p>Desperation puts you at a disadvantage when you're looking for a mate or a job. People who can fake disinterest have the advantage over those with genuine neediness.<p>Yet, I would think that honesty and sincerity are key attributes of mates and employees.
Have as many kids as you can. Only they can give you the happiest and saddest moments of your life. And to better understand life, you need to know and go both extremes. Every smile is a hug to your heart, every tear is a kick to your soul. At the end of the journey, they will be the real treasure of your existence.
A few weeks ago I decided that all common life lessons are only notable because they are unintuitive, go directly against millions of years of human development. Don't judge a book by its cover, don't count your chickens before they hatch, etc. I feel like all these phrases came about as condescending told-you-so's rather than actual meaningful guidelines.
That thread points out a huge problem with the quora format - ideally people could vote up suggestions on a per-item basis, so that the community could collectively produce the best list of items.<p>Instead people produce long-winded all-encompassing content-duplicating posts, so we end up with a jumbled mess of data.
One thing I haven't seen yet:<p>Generally, in most companies you have as much authority as you dare. The best way to get promoted is to just start doing the job you want to have and then have your title changed later. The idea that the organization and leadership of a company flows in exactly the manner the org chart specifies is a complete and utter fallacy. In reality, in most companies there is a lot of leadership coming from unexpected places, especially at a tech. company. If you sit back and wait for authority to be given to you that'll almost never happen, if you start spearheading worthwhile initiatives and start being an advocate for useful change, you'll get that authority in practice before you get it officially.
I hate to be negative and there's some good advice here, but really a lot of this is just replacing old unresearched assumptions with newer pronouncements that are similarly without any reference. At best these are left un-sourced, at worst they seem to be based purely on personal experience. Yet most of these are or could be topics of unbias study. A few examples:<p><i>Buy a nice bed. Buy a very nice mattress and high-thread-count sheets. You will need to test out a variety of mattresses to find the one that fits you best but if you find the right one, it will greatly enhance the quality of your sleep, and subsequently, your waking life.</i><p>Why is it that more expensive mattresses = better sleep? Cite the evidence showing that high thread-count sheets = better sleep, which in tern laeds to improvements in waking life.<p><i>You can accomplish more if you work less and sleep more. Hypothetically a well-rested person working 55-hour work weeks can usually outperform a sleep-deprived person working 80-hour work weeks in terms of quality, all else equal (specifically for knowledge work).</i><p>Hypothetically this isn't true at all. Is there evidence to support this hypothesis or not? If not, this adds nothing to the debate.<p><i>You can pay the farmer, or you can pay the doctor. Prevention (i.e. good diet and food ingredients) is an order of magnitude cheaper than treatment (most age-related diseases are correlated with poor dietary choices).</i><p>This is trite and catch-all. What is good diet? There is no common agreement (see: high carb/high protein/high fat discussions). Show the evidence that this is 'an order of magnitude' cheaper than treatment. What are 'good ingredients'. You recommend free-range meats? Grass-fed beef? Locally produced? Define 'good'.<p><i>A cheap chair and mattress may end up costing you 10-20x in doctor's bills.</i><p>Says who? 10-20x seems pretty specific - what's the citation on that? A 'cheap' chair - so is price the only metric? Any $2000 chair is worth it and saves money on doctor's bills? Doesn't it matter how often i spend sitting? Could there not be cheap chairs that are actually better than many expensive ones? What's an 'expensive' mattress?<p><i>Spoken communication has a massive non-verbal component. Study body language and you'll be pretty shocked at how often peoples' spoken words contradict their telltale non-verbal cues.</i><p>Citation please. A lot of the 'non-verbal communication' stuff (read: NLP) is considered unscientific gumf.<p>Don't get me wrong, there's some great advice in here. But around half is stuff that can be scientifically demonstrated and just off-handedly saying something is invalid whilst proclaiming the opposite without providing any citations is counter-productive. It just encourages "common knowledge" of the same old wives tales and folklore that it itself is trying to counteract.
<i>Happiness = Outcome - Expectations. The key to enjoying life is keeping expectations low to the degree that you're always pleasantly surprised.</i><p>I find this a bad advice due to many different reasons. First and foremost, startups must have high expectations in order to, well, start up. People would never, ever create a company <i>assuming</i> it would go straight to hell after six months.<p>What also bothers me with this statement is that, by keeping expectations low, you would <i>probably</i> not work as much as you would if you had higher expectations.<p>As a final note, I have always kept my expectations very, very high. I always aim for A's at university. Yet, I do not feel less happy than the average Joe, even though I sometimes get a B or a C.
"Money CAN buy happiness", have a child and suddenly the value of having money goes up a hundred fold. The desire to make lots of money is not always based on greed!
There is an inverse relationship between the extent to which someone labels themself as an authority and the extent to which they actually are an authority.<p>Corollary: Be particularly wary of medical "experts".<p>Second, and self-referential, corollary: Be particularly wary of "bitter" people and comments.
That there was a market for expired lightbulbs in the Soviet Union because working ones were hard to source.
People would bring the expired ones to work and swap them for working ones.<p>There's a life lesson there somewhere.
After reading through all the awesome comments on this thread on Quora, I created a Prezi to summarize it all. I posted it as an answer summary.<p>But some guy named Richard Henry --- Quora Admin --- deleted it. Said it wasn't a summary and was not useful.<p>Here it is, if you're interested in the summary: <a href="http://prezi.com/l1wuvbaya37o/quora-life-lessons/" rel="nofollow">http://prezi.com/l1wuvbaya37o/quora-life-lessons/</a>