Tag: advice

~ Mark

Life Lessons with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – 20 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 30 – Esquire.

Career is never as important as family. The better you are at your job, the more you’re rewarded, financially and spiritually, by doing it. You know how to solve problems for which you receive praise and money. Home life is more chaotic. Solving problems is less prescriptive and no one’s applauding or throwing money if you do it right. That’s why so many young professionals spend more time at work with the excuse, “I’m sacrificing for my family.” Bullshit. Learn to embrace the chaos of family life and enjoy the small victories.

Mean Professor Tells Student to “get your sh*t together” | Things Doanie Likes

~ Mark

One of the perks of the job.

xxxx, get your shit together. Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential.

This is straight out of the Marcus Aurelius playbook. One of my favorite passages from Meditations comes in Book 5:

Display those virtues which are wholly in your own power–integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity. Do you not see how many virtues you can already display without any excuse of lack of talent or aptitude? And yet you are still content to lag behind.

Mean Professor Tells Student to “get your sh*t together” | Things Doanie Likes

~ Mark

Take the hard feelings away, and this is the right thing to do. Put the feelings back and it hurts like hell, but the right thing to do hasn’t changed.

Carolyn Hax.

Advice for Boys – The Bygone Bureau

~ Mark

My readers taught me as much about listening and taking people’s problems seriously as anything I have ever done. They taught me the value of what kindness and generosity can do, not only for the person receiving it but for you who give. Of what happens when you give people the space to talk about themselves, and of how much guys will start to talk about their feelings if we give them space to do so.

Advice for Boys – The Bygone Bureau

~ Mark

Get out of the conceptual rut that a good life looks one way and a disappointing one looks another.

Carolyn Hax.
~ Mark

When people bypass simple solutions to write to someone like me, that tends to mean there’s an ulterior motive on board.

Caroyln Hax. Ha! Awesome.
~ Mark

Preface otherwise banal life wisdom with “My father once taught me…” (or similar) and it then becomes rich with generational credibility.

Ben Casnocha.

10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You

~ Mark

6. Read obituaries. They are just like biographies, only shorter. They remind us that interesting, successful people rarely lead orderly, linear lives.

7. Your parents don’t want what is best for you. They want what is good for you, which isn’t always the same thing. There is a natural instinct to protect our children from risk and discomfort, and therefore to urge safe choices.

10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You

Overcoming Bias : ‘Never Settle’ Is A Brag

~ Mark

Robin Hanson on Steve Jobs’ commencement speech:

Now notice: doing what you love, and never settling until you find it, is a costly signal of your career prospects. Since following this advice tends to go better for really capable people, they pay a smaller price for following it. So endorsing this strategy in a way that makes you more likely to follow it is a way to signal your status.

It sure feels good to tell people that you think it is important to “do what you love”; and doing so signals your status. You are in effect bragging. Don’t you think there might be some relation between these two facts?

Megan McArdle’s follow-up:

The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, “Yeah, I didn’t get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year.”

She continues, talking about talking about her own awesome job with aspiring young folk:

Usually, what I tell them next is that it’s not a tragedy if they don’t do what they thought they wanted to do at 22; that they have more time than they think to figure out “what they want to do with the rest of their lives”; and that the world outside of school and words is more interesting than they probably suspect.

Similarly, Will Wilkinson on commencement advice:

“Find what you love and never settle for less” is an excellent recipe for frustration and poverty. “Reconcile yourself to the limits of your talent and temperament and find the most satisfactory compromise between what you love to do and what you need to do to feed your children” is rather less stirring, but it’s much better advice.

Overcoming Bias : ‘Never Settle’ Is A Brag

~ Mark

Via mhsteger, a few of Sydney Smith’s prescriptions for low spirits, from a February, 1820 letter to Lady Georgiana Morpeth:

6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.

7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you.

11th. Don’t expect too much from human life—a sorry business at the best.

14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.

15th. Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.

17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.

18th. Keep good blazing fires.

~ Mark

The difference between potential and output comes from human qualities. You can make a list of the qualities you admire and those you despise. To turn the tables, think if this is the way I react to the qualities on the list, which is the way the world will react to me. You can learn to turn on those qualities you want and turn off those qualities you wish to avoid. The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. You can’t change at 60; the time to look at that list is now.

Warren Buffett on habits and being a better person. Ties in with some of my thoughts on a well-balanced life earlier this year. Write it down, check in every so often, re-calibrate as needed.
~ Mark

Hang around people who are better than you all the time. You do pick up the behavior of people who are around you. It will make you a better person. Marry upward. That is the person who is going to have the biggest effect on you. A relationship like that over the decades will do nothing but good.

Warren Buffett. And if you can’t find/identify people who are better than you, you’re probably an asshole.