This is all from painful experience. A lot of times people say, “only experience teaches.”
Well, I don’t believe that. Hopefully this list will also teach and then you don’t have to have the experience.
A) Don’t date someone who is also dating someone else.
- They are not trustworthy
- They won’t be able to end it with the other person as easily as they say they will.
- What goes around comes around.
B) Toxic people are contagious, so don’t spend time with them.
If you spend time with someone who gets drunk every day, then you will start getting drunk every day.
If you spend time with someone who likes to gossip negatively about their friends, then either you will start gossiping or they will start gossiping negatively about you.
If someone borrows money from others and doesn’t return it, then they will do the same to you.
If someone spends time with other toxic people, then you are indirectly spending time with those toxic people because you will get the virus through your friend.
C) Don’t give Advice.
Nobody wants your advice.
Tell a story of what happened to you.
For instance: above. I dated someone who drank at least five to ten glasses of wine every day.
We started getting more serious. I thought she would start. Soon, I was drinking a lot every day. We’d get into huge arguments. I’d oversleep. I missed important meetings. I lost friends.
Bad things happened.
So I can’t say: “don’t hang out with bad people”. But I can tell the story of what happened to me and you can decide whether or not to follow.
Nobody listens to advice anyway.
D) Don’t under promise and over deliver.
People are often proud that they “under promise and over deliver”. Under-promising is called “lying”.
This happened: “It can get done in two months”. And then they finished it in one month. I was not impressed. Instead, I was disappointed for an entire month. And I mis-planned everything.
Whenever I had a client in my old business I’d first “over promise” and they would act with surprise: “Really?” and because of that they’d hire me.
And THEN I’d over deliver. Gives me two chances to amaze them and then they are a client for life.
I try to do this in every area of my life. Sometimes when I fail on the over deliver part it’s still ok because I’ve built up such trust by trying my hardest after over-promising.
E) Don’t live your life like it’s your last day.
That doesn’t even mean anything and yet everyone says it. Does it mean you should party all day? Or does it mean to not worry about the future.
I try to do this instead: live life like it’s everyone else’s last day.
Then you learn to treat everyone with the highest respect. They are dying tomorrow!
Plus, I think I’m going to live forever. So far, statistically, it seems I never die on any one day.
F) Don’t outsource your self-esteem
I went out with a girl and I was always afraid she was going to fall out of “like” with me. I did everything I could to please her, even if it was making me unhappy.
She liked me initially because I was confident and funny.
But then I gave her my self-esteem. It was hard enough for her to handle her own self-esteem, let alone mine as well.
So we were both miserable until she finally broke up with me. And then my self-esteem was crushed even more. It took a long time to get it back. Maybe I never got it back.
But I won’t do it again.
G) Don’t quit THESE things:
You can quit your job, you can quit a relationship, a career, a family, an organization, whatever.
But one time I made a lot of money and I decided somehow, “ok, I did it! I don’t have to keep improving as a human being.”
And I lost track of all the things that were important in my life up until that moment:
PHYSICAL: Food Sleep Move (improve every day)
EMOTIONAL: Be around good people who love you and you love
CREATIVE: Write ten ideas every day no matter what. Creativity compounds
SPIRITUAL: Always have beginner’s mind in a world filled with experts.
There’s no finish line. There’s no end goal.
No growth = No life.
H) Don’t TAKE Advice
Everyone has their own agenda. Everyone has their own list of stories.
You can listen. You can file away the story. You can think about it.
Everyone has investment advice. Health advice (no “gluten!”). Money advice (“401ks!”), Education advice (“Harvard!”). Career advice (“Wall Street!”), etc.
They are only telling you their dreams.
My own dreams are deep inside, my secret wishes since I was a little boy. I can tell when I am moving in the right direction.
I get a feeling in my upper chest. A warmth and excitement. No matter what the advice is, that warmth and excitement and playfulness is the thing I listen to.
Plus, nobody follows advice anyway (as said above).
I) Don’t Gossip
It’s none of your business.
Words have value. “In the beginning was the WORD”.
When you gossip, you increase the supply of your words and reduce the demand for them.
So the value of what you say will go down. And then less people listen to you. And life gets worse.
Whenever I say anything bad about anyone else, they eventually find out somehow. And my life turns miserable.
And whenever I say something good about someone else, I turn out to be wrong.
So now I listen.
J) Don’t listen to what they say, listen to what they mean.
There’s always a good reason and a real reason.
When my daughter says she wants to study in the library, that’s a great reason.
The real reason is there might be boys in the library.
When someone says, “We need to hire this guy. He’s got A, B, C skills” that’s a great reason.
The real reason is they might be married to each other’s cousins. Who knows.
The real reason might not be bad. But there’s ALWAYS a real reason that’s different than the good reason.
Your job is to find out what.
By the way, Don’t listen to anything I say.
Life is an experiment. That’s the beauty of all of this. We’re all scientists in this giant laboratory.
Our life is a list of the experiments we try, the discoveries we make, the failures we encounter along the way to greater successes and rewards.
If you just listen, you never learn. If you just learn, you never do.
And the way to DO is to experiment and see what sets your heart on fire.
And then life becomes a bright flame, a beacon for all who come after you and for all those you love around you.
This post first appeared on The Feel Good Things Over The Internet, please read the originial post: here
