wise Wise Thoughts

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Introduction

These are some lessons I wish I had learned much earlier in life.

The Lessons

  1. Do it now! Nearly all the great mathematicians and physicists did their best work in their twenties. If you have grand dreams, realise them now. You may well not have the energy later. Time seems to stretch endlessly ahead of you, but it is over in an eyeblink.
  2. Don't be attached to the results of your action. Constant checking to see if your work has born fruit just wastes time and causes discouragement. Some liken it to digging up a seed you have planted each day to see how it is doing. Get on with something else. Never underestimate the power of the futile gesture.
  3. If someone does not like you, even if they once did, give up. Even if you succeed in temporarily getting them to like you, it will take escalating work to maintain the relationship. Seek your partners among those that naturally like you. The rest might as well be invisible vis a vis potential partners. Chasing after people who have rejected you is as silly as going to the movies and waiting for some movie stare to become your partner. On the other hand, don't presume people won't like you just because they are extraordinarily wonderful or beautiful. Pay attention to the objective clues as to how well they like you, not to how well you calculate they should like you based on your relative pecking order status. Hollywood convention is that if the girl rejects the guy in the first reel, guaranteed they will be married in the last. Real life does not work that way. Movies are just wishful fantasies.
  4. Understating your case is more persuasive than overstating it. You supply the facts. Let others supply the emotion. If you supply the emotion, others will take no action, believing you must have already handled the problem.
  5. When you can't get what you want, one alternative to trying harder to get it, is to talk yourself out of wanting it so badly, at least not getting yourself upset over it. Similarly, when people do obnoxious things, you are not obligated to get upset. For exactly how to avoid getting upset, see Living Love.
  6. You can't tell if someone is lying just by how sincere they sound. Habitual liars are those who have polished lying to a high art. You would never suspect them based on their look or demeanor.
  7. The years pass faster and faster as you get older. By the time you reach puberty, your life is half over in psychological time. Don't procrastinate the truly important things.
  8. If it sounds to good to be true, it nearly always is. Don't waste time looking for zero-effort ways to do things. You just set yourself up to be conned. Find out what methods the people who actually succeeded have used.
  9. Think globally; act locally. Saving the world is a huge job. Yours is just a small part. However, it is a necessary part.
  10. The things you worry most about almost never happen. If you don't believe me, start tracking them.
  11. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result. Persistence is great, but you must persist with something that works.
  12. Other people do things that annoy you, not to annoy you, but in the usually-vain hope that doing so will make them feel better.
  13. Despite the protestations of absolute Truth, there is a tremendous amount of lying surrounding religion and spirituality.
  14. At many times in your life it will seem as if you have absolutely no energy or resources. But even then you can find something you can do that will marginally improve your lot or keep it from getting even worse than it would have naturally.
  15. If you are not making any progress on your big dreams, the very bigness of the dreams may be paralysing you. Think instead, "What could I do today that would marginally improve my lot." Focus not so much on where you want to go, but where you could go immediately from here.
  16. When you are coming in for a landing in an plane and your ears won't pop and you have a splitting headache, just plug your nose and blow gently.
  17. When you have dry congested nose, just snort up a bit of water to clean it out.
  18. The human body is only designed to last for forty years in the wild. You must take extraordinary care of it over your whole life if you want it to last you in comfort the eighty or ninety we humans live now. Don't buy into the religious notion it is wicked to look after your body.
  19. While chasing after riches leads to an empty life, chasing after poverty also leads to misery. Neither extreme is as pleasant as the fairy tales make it out to be.

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