(page down for full description of each)
11. Beware advice to stand up for your rights
10. Avoid exotic partners, houses and cars
9. Always turn up on time
8. Never mistake what a woman says she wants for what she wants (advice for your son, mostly)
7. Follow your passion ... and keep your day job
6. Pick a life partner who takes responsibility
5. Pick a partner who is not a control freak
4. Always know how to stand on your own feet even if someone is carrying you
3. Never be a ship's doctor
2. Little of any worth takes less than ten years
1. Get the best education you can, as early as you can
11. Beware advice to stand up for your rights
People can be relied upon to act mostly in their self-interests.
Some people are masters at getting others to fight their fights for them or to "take a bullet" for them. Sometimes they will even send another person into battle because they are jealous of them.
Misery loves company. A divorcee might try to "recruit" you with great stories of how good life is being divorced from a subconscious jealousy.
No one knows better than you how good or bad a deal is for you. Don't let anyone talk you into making irreversible decisions in your life. Be suspicious of anyone who is suggesting you put your boss, your spouse or anyone else in his place. Decide for yourself what is best.
10. Avoid exotic partners, houses and cars
Partners, houses and cars are hard to get rid of when you need to move on.
Houses: If you buy a funky house, built by an eccentric professor at the end of a cul-de-sac, you may like it for a while but come time to sell it, your available market is limited because of the unusualness of the house.
Secondly, there are reasons a particular type of house is built in a given area at a certain time. the neighborhood is largely designed to accommodate elderly residents, but your house has three narrow flights of stairs.
Don't be the guy on the street with the exotic house.
Cars: there's nothing easier to shed than a four-door basic model automatic compact car in reasonable condition. Average or "normal" is best when it comes to cars.
Try not to be the guy trying to sell the four year-old Jaguar XK8.
Partners: My wife and I grew up two counties away from one another and twenty years on, but we still puzzle at the challenges our different cultural values present us with. Sometimes it's like we speak different languages.
I don't know what the statistics are, but a betting person's money is on the notion that, all else being equal, cultural differences present challenges to a marriage.
Again, all else being equal, pick a life partner that has had a similar background to yours. Or better said, pick someone that has similar values.
If your husband-to-be believes that universal health care is not a good idea, and you believe that it should be ever citizen's right, then you and your husband-to-be have different values.
If you really must go exotic, food, clothes and travel destinations are a good option.
9. Always turn up on time
As my daughter's music instructor says "Early is on time; on time is late; late is unacceptable".
When your child makes a promise to meet someone at 4pm, the person they are meeting is reasonable in expecting your child to be there at 4pm. They may turn up before 4pm which is fine, but at 4pm on the nose, each of them should be there.
Why is this so important?
If I were to borrow $20 from you today and promise that next Saturday I would repay to you the $20, you would be reasonable in expecting to have the $20 returned next Saturday, right?
Most people understand and accept that.
If I turned up next Saturday, handed you $19.50 (instead of the full $20 I owed you) and said "there's your money back. Thanks for the loan", you might laugh and draw my attention to it, especially if you sensed I thought it was normal behavior.
Almost everyone understands that money owed should be repaid in full, so why are some folks so loose with your time? They're careful to hand you back the $20 in full, but think nothing of leaving you standing on a street corner or waiting alone somewhere for 5 or 10 minutes. What is five minutes of your time worth? Nothing?
(By the way, I'm not talking about arriving at a cocktail party, but those times where someone is actually waiting for you to turn up when you said you would before they continue.)
Your child should know that it is better to arrive thirty minutes early than ten minutes late. Other people's time is more valuable than other people's money. If you wouldn't stiff a friend for the money you owe them, your values suggest you wouldn't want to stiff them for their time either.
Punctuality with other people's time is a mark of respect. Your child will serve her own interests well by turning up on time, every time.
8. Never mistake what a woman says she wants for what she wants (advice for your son, mostly)
I often get in trouble when I mention this rule. My mother (a woman, obviously) first told me this when I was about twenty years of age. The axiom is terribly politically incorrect of course, but what she meant was that, for men, who typically hear a voiced problem as a "call to action to fix something", a communication from their partner might just mean that: a communication. It can also mean something quite different.
In terms of inter-relational communication at least, women are more complex than men are when it comes to verbal communication. As my brother pointed out, (by the way, see how I can blame my family
members for all the politically incorrect stuff) two women and a man can be sitting at a table, and the two women can be having a fight without the man even noticing.Generally speaking, any communication between two people is either a cry for help or an act of love.
A woman can be performing an act of love and the man can pick it up as a cry for help. Or the other way round.
A man just has to know that he might have it the wrong way round.
7. Follow your passion ... and keep your day job
Negative Motivation Versus Positive Motivation:
If you are motivated to do something because of the pain of not doing it, once you have done it enough to alleviate the pain, your commitment is likely to wane. That's the big drawback with Negative Motivation.
If you are motivated to do something because you like doing it, you are far more likely to continue doing it, with a great deal more enthusiasm, for a lot longer, and a lot better. That's the GREAT THING about Positive Motivation.
So, make sure you have a passion in your life.
As Barbara Sher said, you don't have to give up your full time job and live in a garret (a place where artists work) just because you'd love to try your hand at oil pastels.
Look at your day job as a way to feed your passion. You do it during the day to earn enough money to pay the bills and put food on the table. That will give you the time and space in the evening to invest in your passion.
6. Pick a life partner who takes responsibility
When things go wrong in life, a given person tends to either take responsibility for what has gone wrong or look for someone to blame. It's not black or white of course; few people are either totally responsible or totally irresponsible. And a person may, for example, take responsibility quickly for an accident they caused, but might be unwilling to take responsibility for being 100 lbs overweight.
Still, people tend to reside on the same general part of the Responsibility Spectrum.
Picture yourself as a passenger in a car with your new boy/girlfriend, traveling in moderate city traffic. The traffic ahead of you stops suddenly while your friend had taken his/her eyes off the road. The car you are riding in rear-ends the car in front. By any traffic regulations I have ever known, it is clearly the fault of the car in the rear (your car in this instance).How does your friend react?
If they explode into a "look what that stupid driver did!" reaction, they might tend to reside towards the "left end" of the Responsibility Spectrum (above).
If they immediately express remorse for the accident and concern for you and the strangers in the car in front, they may tend to reside towards the right of the Responsibility Spectrum.
Put another way, people whose behavior tends to fall on the right side of the Responsibility Spectrum tend also to look for ways in which they personally contributed to any problem that surfaces, be it in your relationship with them or in any other aspect of their lives. Such an approach allows them to grow and mature in a more constructive and loving way.
Pick a life partner who tends to live on the right side of the spectrum.
5. Pick a partner who is not a control freak
It is often said that life is a long series of letting go of things.
Addiction is not just about when you take something away, you feel pain. Addiction is when the object of your addiction is making the decisions. When you are addicted to heroine, for example, you will do things to get the next fix that a normal, sane person would never do. You might share a hypodermic needle with a stranger in an alleyway because you won't wait another thirty minutes to get home to where you have a clean needle.
Addiction makes you do really stupid things because, well, the addiction is making the decisions to satisfy its own needs, not yours.
Human beings get addicted to alcohol, heroine, nicotine, money, adrenaline, fame and countless other things.
For the purposes of this perhaps simplistic point of view, the next level down from addiction is the thing called attachment. Attachment is a kind of "decaffeinated" addiction. Whereas in the case of addiction, the subject controls the person, with attachment, it's a case of the person having a tough time giving up the thing they are attached to, but still remaining essentially in control.
People get attached to lots of things, and because attachment is not the out-of-control mess that addiction is, it can go quite unnoticed for what it is until one day, the object of one's affections is lost. You might have been attached to your immaculate collector's 1970 Pontiac GTO that you kept in storage, then one day, it got stolen. You were fond of, and very attached to, the GTO, but you didn't beat your wife up when it was lost.
How a person responds to the loss tells you a lot. One of the attachments that many of us are loathe to relinquish is the notions we have about ourselves. For example, you might believe that you are an excellent driver. Then one day you rear-end another car at a traffic light, and suddenly, your self image, that of being a careful driver, is shattered. The car damage is nothing compared to the devastating feeling that you might not actually be that "very good driver" after all. Suddenly, that notion you had of yourself was ripped from your hands.
How quickly do you let go of that notion?
When you realize you do not have control over something, do you deal with it gracefully?
Imagine again your future life partner and you are traveling into town to a classy restaurant, with plenty of time for the 8pm reservation you made six weeks earlier. You turn a corner and lo and behold, you are stuck in traffic caused by a major accident ahead. Clearly, you will lose your table reservation for this must-book-weeks-in-advance restaurant. What does your future partner do in this situation? Do they freak out, swearing and shouting in frustration, or do they quickly come to terms with the fact that there is no point in getting so upset?
The more gracefully your life partner deals with such loss of control, the easier your life is going to be. Look out for that situation when you are dating. In the long life you are planning together, you'll be faced with many, many such situations.
It is much easier to build a life with someone who does not sweat the small stuff.
4. Always know how to stand on your own feet even if someone is carrying you
During the probable half-century you might be in the workforce, you may once or twice have the benefit of a "secure job". Beware! There is no such thing as a secure job. It might look like it, but in the long term, it is unlikely that any employer can offer you lifetime employment. There are exceptions of course but you won't be sure it is a secure job until you are walking out the door of retirement with a pension book in your hand, but you can't plan on the assumption that it will happen.
A pilot instruction friend of mine said that wherever he flies, a thought is always at the back of his mind: "where could I land right now if my engine failed?"
It's not an obsession with him, but it is a "rule of thumb" he uses to test his immediate security.
I assert to you that in your own career, where you can, have an answer to the question Where would I get a job today if I had to?
There will be exceptions to the rule of always having a "landing strip" close by. You might be on an exciting two-year company-sponsored business trip to Asia, where you are largely removed from easy access to jobs in your home town or country, but which will offer significant career opportunity. Such gambles are always worth considering.
3. Never be a ship's doctor
Whatever career you pick, make sure your line of work is also the core competency of the organization you are working for.
How do you know what an organization's core competency is?
Follow the money. A quick way to know is to see what their customers pay the most money for.
If you are a doctor, work in a hospital, not in the army, a cruise ship or a corporation. If you are a doctor and a brain surgeon, work for a hospital that specializes in brain surgery.
If you are a car mechanic, work for a garage whose business is servicing cars. If their specialty is selling cars and not servicing cars, go find yourself a place that specializes in servicing cars.
If you are working for yourself, make sure you do something that plays to your strengths.
Peter, a very bright software engineer I worked with in the 1990s told me of a job he had as a software engineer with a copper mining company in Utah in a former life. He consistently got high performance reviews year over year and he felt his job was safe, especially when he measured up against the general crowd of mining expertise he observed in the company.
Then one day, the company had to cut costs and needed to let a bunch of employees go. Shocked and surprised, Peter and most of the software engineers were the first to be shown the door.
Why?
Because they were not central to the company's core competency - the skill set that their customers paid for - they were easy to cut from the payroll.
When your specialty is your employer's specialty, you will be among the best paid, most up-to-date and secure-jobbed people in the company.
2. Little of any worth takes less than ten years
Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year - and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!
- Tony Robbins
- Tony Robbins
In my almost five decades on the planet, I have noticed a pattern. The magic number of 10 keeps coming up as an indicator of value creation. Whether you are creating a company, a child, learning a language or building a marriage, things seem to only begin to reach critical mass around the ten year mark.
Great if you can make a go of something and sell it or get rewarded in some significant way in the shorter term, but my recommendation is:
Aim for the long term unless you have specific reasons to think in the short term.
Pick projects, jobs, careers and partners that you see a long term value in.
Forget about one-night-stands and date those you can imagine holding hands with when you are old. Good character and kind personality stay with a person until the day you die. Nice legs and six-pack abs will all be gone before you know it and your life partner's character will be all that is left. Pick a life partner with good character, and don't focus on their appearance, unless their appearance represents some kind of self-abuse or relationship-challenging issue.
1. Get the best education you can, as early as you can
Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation between education early in life and quality of life later in life. Yes, there are people with PhDs living in destitution, and the richest man in the world never completed college, but they are the exceptions, and the exceptions are few.
A friend of mine has a master's degree in nuclear physics. I do not. In fact, I've never been to college. We often banter about the value of a degree. He says it really doesn't matter that much. "You've got incredible experience in the software industry", he tells me, "which eclipses any requirement for a university degree".
I can't tell you, though, how many jobs I've applied for over the years where, before I've ever been given a chance to meet for an interview, my application was filtered out because of my lack of formal third level education. It might not make a big difference in your day-to-day job twenty years from now, but it sure helps getting the job in the first place. And all the jobs before it.
For the decades I've been in the workplace, because of my lack of a degree, I've felt the need to "look over my shoulder" on many occasion. In a small way, it might have helped me stay on my toes, and I might have even developed a skill to preempt a coming change, because I could never rest on the strength of a degree I never had. But in the long run, a degree is an all but necessary investment.
Even if you have to work weekends and holidays, get yourself through college. If you can't go to a fancy one, go to the best one that'll have you. Stay focused on your studies while you are there. If you skipped college, and you are now working in a dead-end career as a result of it, research how you can study for a degree in your spare time. It's only too late if you don't start now.
There'll be plenty of years ahead where you can party. Once you have your degree in your pocket, you'll have access to better jobs, you'll be more attractive and better educated, you'll know more stuff, you'll have higher self-esteem, and a degree is one of very few things in life that can't easily be taken away from you.
