“As soon as you stop looking, that’s when The One will show up!”
Nope, not even a little bit. It’s bad advice for anyone to blindly adopt, but especially bad advice for a homebody like me who would never meet a man if she didn’t actively look.
This.
And along with this, I would question whether the notion that there is “The One for you” soulmate is a case of illogical/romantic wishful thinking.
Someone once said that there are hundreds of people in the world that you could be happily married to - that any or each of them would be suitable for you. I disagreed at first, but now I find myself starting to agree.
I think it’s actually way more than hundreds - there are probably a dozen you know personally that you could have a happy marriage with.
Of course, it’s generally a bad idea to tell your husband or wife that…
My wife and I tried for a long time to make a baby the old-fashioned way. It didn’t work, so we adopted our son (who’s now 11).
As soon as we adopted, the Conventional Wisdom (as expressed by literally dozens of friends and relatives) was “Now that you’ve adopted, you’ll relax and she’ll get pregnant. That happened to my ________ (sister, cousin, co-worker, whoever)”
Nope. And barring a visit from the angel Gabriel, my son will remain an only chid.
Pretty much every piece of conventional wisdom I ever heard with regard to weight control didn’t work at all for me personally. I know that some have been validated by studies, but I had to give up each and every one to be successful.
[ul]
[li]Weigh yourself regularly/every day[/li][li]Get rid of your fat clothes[/li][li]Incorporate exercise into your plan[/li][li]Eat many small meals instead of three meals a day[/li][li]Closely track what you eat[/li][/ul]
“Everything will be okay if you just smile, think positive, and have faith!” Sorry, this does not solve problems and make bad things go away, nor does it cure depression.
Completely agree! I’ve noticed my threshold for small problems is a lot higher than most people and end up getting fantastic deals on vehicles. I’ve only ever bought two new vehicles, both motorcycles.
I just picked up a car I’ve been looking for for some time. I got what I think is a really good deal because it has a little dent and a couple of minor issued I fixed myself in about a half-hour with parts I had on-hand. I paid about half what “perfect” ones are going for.
Only complaint is that it is white. Refrigerators and Hondas are white. Oh well.
This. I’m probably going to slap the next person who says “Fake it till you make it” to me.
I think this one has sort of gone full circle though. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone under the age of 50 saying a used car is a bad idea, however I know a great many people (myself included) who have been brought up with the idea that buying new is always a bad deal. Especially with what used car prices have been doing lately, if you actually crunch the numbers a new car is sometimes a better deal over the long term than a slightly-used one.
I think that’s part of why the off-the-lot depreciation on things like Hondas is now nearly nothing-- those are the kinds of cars “sensible” people drive and “sensible” people have all been raised with the conventional wisdom that you should always buy used, and so they do even when the numbers don’t really support it.
With respect asking high-school classmates on dates: “You don’t make 100% of the shots you don’t take!”. True, but if Wayne Gretsky missed a shot, he wasn’t dooming himself to painful awkwardness in all future conversations with the goal.
Also, a hockey player who takes every shot he can, and thus misses 95% of them, is going to be cut from the roster very soon.
I have told people to let their child do what the child loved.
But it was in cases such as “Mommy (SAHM) and Daddy (salesman) want child to be a lawyer, child wants to be a mechanic” or “Mommy (degree in history, primary school teacher) and Daddy (chemist, HS teacher) want child to be a chemical engineer, child wants to be an electrical engineer”.
It’s one of those things which make sense when they make sense, but which are too often applied in ways that don’t make any sense.
I think a big part of this attitude is the result of people taking advice from celebrities. The odds of anyone becoming a celebrity are minescule, so almost all celebrities are people who took a shot at something they loved and were successful against overwhelming odds. So when they choose to impart their wisdom to the masses it generally includes this type of “pursue your dream” inspirational advice, which many star-struck younger people take seriously.
Myself, I’m “doing what I love” in the sense that I love getting a paycheck. But it can be a problem when doing job interviews - that’s not what potential employers are looking to hear. 
One that I heard, I think it’s a quote from Henry Ford, was, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you are right.”
On the surface, this seems to make a lot of sense. You cannot succeed unless you think you can succeed – this is probably true, but thinking you can succeed is hardy sufficient.
Saying you will fail if you think you will is not always true either. After only 5 years experience with programming, I was hired for a job that I was certain that I would fail at, because it relied heavily on knowing the hardware side of the computer business. My first day on the job, I was handed logic diagrams for the device I would be writing code for, given some quick hints about symbols and such, then told that my manager was busy but he should be able to help me with the diagrams in a day or two.
I surprised my manager (and myself!) by managing to figure it all out in just one or two days poring over the diagrams.
Another good example of this is the “imposter syndrome”. It seems to me that almost everyone starting a new job–particularly a highly technical one–experiences something like this. And yet more often than not, people find a way to be at least adequate.
Ruth Graham’s takedown of “No one ever wishes on his deathbed that he’d spent more time at the office.”:
Agreed. I’ve always heard that buying used always gets you more bang for your buck (and followed this advice without regretting it), but the next time I’m looking to replace my car, I’ll at least consider getting a new one. What with recent improvements to cars, financial incentives, and the used car market nowadays (perhaps partly due to the “cash for clunkers” a few years ago), I’m not so sure that buying used is always the better deal.
I think there’s a fair amount of misinterpretation going on with some of the (by now) hackneyed pieces of advice.
For example, letting your anger out wasn’t probably ever meant as an exhortation to lose your temper and act beastly, but rather as an admonition to not disguise the fact that something angers you. I mean, if you camouflage that, you’re not setting boundaries, and the other people are going to continue to do whatever behavior is pissing you off, and you’re going to get more and more pissed, and they’ll never know.
That won’t do wonders for your psyche to bottle that kind of thing up for an extended period.
So let them know that it makes you angry and to stop doing it. That doesn’t mean to throw things, scream, etc… and that’s where the misinterpretation comes in.
My perspective on that is that people take for granted what they’ve achieved and want to have all that plus something else. So a guy achieved a certain amount of financial success by spending a lot of time at the office, and who is able to give his family a comfortable lifestyle as a result, eventually comes to look at that as having been inevitable, and wishes he had spent more time with his family.
What the guy might not be appreciating is that had he spent less time at the office he might not have been successful in his career and might have had all sorts of financial problems which could have caused tension with his family and so on.
Of course, the true workaholic who ignores his family is making a mistake. You need balance. But the definitive “no one ever says …” is a mistake IMO.
I have a different calculation here.
I’ve never bought collision/comprehensive insurance on any car, and have saved a good five figure sum over the years. Bt I can only do that because I tend to own cheaper cars, so I never have a huge sum at risk with no coverage. But if I would buy new cars I would have to insure them, which would be costly.
“God never gives you more than you can handle.”
Even when I was devoutly religious, this saying made me angry. Tell that to the millions of people around the world who have killed themselves in just the past year.