These are short but generally useful pieces of advice you can apply to your everyday life.
1.Don’t try harder, try differently. If you’re trying to do something and it’s not working, and you try again and it’s not working again, take a step back and try to figure out if there’s a different way to go about doing things. This is applicable to everything from packing a truck to solving people problems.
2. “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.” – Steve Jobs
3. The way you are today is most likely the way you will always be — change is hard. You can’t even change yourself 10 percent. But you can change 10 things about yourself 1 percent. Make tiny changes you can sustain.
4. “In whatever you are doing, failure is an option, fear is not” –James Cameron
5. When you take a new job, negotiate for more vacation time, not for more money. Then take all your vacation every single year. You can always get more money — you can never get more time.
6. “You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.”–Jonathan Franzen
7. Money talks — it says “goodbye”. Money will never love you, it can only buy comfort, not love or security or health or opportunity. Money is good to have but it’s not the end goal. Loving another person is the end goal. As the song says, “The greatest thing you will ever learn is to love and be loved in return.” Believe it.
8. Listen more than you talk. Whatever the context, people will think you’re smarter” — Esther Dyson
9. Stop looking for shortcuts. No, really, stop. Read the whole book, not the Wikipedia summary. Think about it. Life is not a collection of sound bites.
10. “No one will ever know anyone. We just have to deal with each other.”–Bret Easton Ellis
11. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” — Mahatma Gandhi
12. Think progress not perfection. In education when someone improves and moves closer to their goal but still struggles this is a good mantra to keep in mind. In education, as well as in life, instant improvement is rare. In day to day life we seek to get better, and even if we still **** up now and then, thinking “progress, not perfection” will keep you motivated when you come up against a challenge.
13. Idleness will almost always lead to regret later. The secret to being happy and content, in general, is to do something of value to yourself and/or others regularly.
14. “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” – Einstein
15. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
— The Stockdale Paradox
16. Remember, 97% of all advice is worthless. Take what you can use, and trash the rest.
17. “When the pain of where you are is greater than the fear of where you are going, you will change.”
18. “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman
19. “The wisdom of the years tells me that growing old is a frame of mind, and the way to stay young is to listen to your dreams and to keep one’s vision more ahead than behind” – Andy Russel
20. Once you understand that habits can be rebuilt, the power of habit becomes easier to grasp, and the only option left is to get to work.” — Charles Duhigg
21. Giving up is always easier than holding on. Funny how people have the courage to miss out the potential and start all over again. Usually repeating the same mistakes over and over again.Don’t give up just yet.
22. “A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride.”–Chinua Achebe
23. “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”–Leo Tolstoy
24. “All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they’ll tell you will be wrong.”–Michael Crichto
25. “Words are important. Your word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are.”–Tom Clancy
