Advice from Brian
- Stories are important, but memory is faulty. Take pictures and make journals, because one day, you will forget an important detail of a story (such as how you met your Wife), and nothing you can do will bring that detail back.
- Differences define us. There is over 7 billion people in the world, and even your neighbors are totally different people than you. World over, there is a sea of different kind of people, all trying to make the most of their lives. Understanding what makes a person different from yourself helps show what traits make you unique. It also helps you understand another persons life, which gains you insight into a perspective you can never experience. If you are a man, have you ever thought about what it must be like to be a mother?
- Complicated isn’t cool. Simple is. Complicated ideas aren’t very interchangeable. If possible, everything in life from ideas to projects should be reduced to the most simplest version of itself that is still practical and relevant. It can then be applied in the most unexpected circumstances.
- Your life is finite. Make plans accordingly. If you wanted to visit burning man one day, the enjoyment you would get out of burning man goes way down when you pass age 28. Putting ‘this is when I die’ on your timeline of future plans makes you miss less opportunities while you are alive.
- Friends advice is sometimes better than significant others. Decisions you make in your life have an impact on the person you are in a relationship with, but not to your friends. Your close friends are in a better position to give advice to you that is altruistic. Pay them the same respect back.
- Opinions will get you into trouble. A lot of ideas in society, such as religion and feminism have zealots behind them who will take personally any criticism of a belief they hold. Keep controversial ideas to yourself unless you can find someone who will discuss them objectively without bias. Also, most controversial opinions (such as political preference) are divided 50/50 for or against, so each opinion stated could alienate potentially half of your audience. Just keep opinions to yourself, and everyone will get along!
- If you don’t change anything, the same thing will keep happening over and over. An odd noise in a car isn’t going to just ‘go away’, it needs to be fixed. Similarly, if you are unhappy how something is going in your life, unless you change something, it will always still be the same. Unhappy with your neighbors? Move. Unhappy with your line of work? Learn a new skill. Nobody is going to do it for you.
- People will rarely change unless they have a good reason to. Wanting someone to change and even recommending it will not cause a change, it will just add to their internal list of reasons they might want to do a change in the future. But you don’t know the true motivation for some behaviors people take on. Even though from your perspective a behavior doesn’t make sense and needs adjusting, you may not understand or accept the true reason someone is doing something.
- Nothing in the world was meant to be. Government, laws, religion, sports, it was all invented by people. And people aren’t perfect. People make mistakes. People also take a bandwagon approach to learning. Take every assumption in life outside of hard scientific fact (1+1 = 2) with a grain of salt, and imagine the other alternative approaches to basic ideas. Imagine a world without any money, for example, to appreciate how money came to be.
- The world owes you nothing. Many people assume that society has been designed in such a way that everything will be distributed somewhat evenly to people. The problem with this is that people lack a good understanding of where things (such as food) come from, and what everyone’s motivation is for providing a particular service. At the end of the day, everyone has their own interest at heart, and anything you are provided is because you’re also giving something else up in trade. Outside of your parents and perhaps a few close friends that love you, nobody has any reason to make your life better than it is.
- You’re probably wrong, you just don’t realize it yet. You’re very young by your standards 10 years from now. Lets say you were to get a tattoo 10 years ago – would you like the tattoo now, 10 years later? Unless you have thought about it enough to the point the tattoo itself is a work of art, you’re going to hate it. I would speculate every decision you make now will be judged negatively down the road. But you still have decisions to make, just do the best you can, and try to not make any decisions you can’t undo. Corollary: Don’t judge past mistakes you made too harshly, but learn from them and deal with them now.
- Have and nurture friendships with women. This seems pretty obvious to myself, but not many men I know keep very many active friendships with women. Women seem far more passionate about life than most men I know. While people get in relationships for a variety of reasons, it seems that the majority of men start to date to find someone to have sex with or someone to start a family with. They are so opportunistic and goal oriented with the women they know, they ignore the possibility that a strong multi year friendships can be formed by just treating them individually as a person.
- Get out and live life. Life is too short to be doing the same thing over and over. There are far more activities than one can possibly think of, and sitting in a suburb refreshing facebook over and over is not going to help you experience them. Do something new!