Yes! I heard this many years ago and this part stuck with me ever since:
Whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.
Followed closely by this Demotivator:
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
It also couldn’t hurt to find a copy of the Notebooks of Lazarus Long.
Trying is the first step towards failure.
And remember: a human can hold, at most, 3-5 things at once in their mind. 
As for advice for a future kid: keep a kid journal. I have - or, I did until they got to their teens. I explained my advice, pasted in emails with stories I told about them to their grandma, vented a bit when I was upset at them.
They know were the files are, and will get them when they are out on their own.
Is that why some people feel so lost?
I started reading “Getting Things Done” but, I’m a bit of a slow reader, and wearing the meditation-blocking glasses didn’t help. So it was taking a long time and I started putting things off, like excercise, work and paying the bills and then my wife left me and I have loads of time but all I do is eat ice cream.
My favorite piece of advice comes from Henry James:
Try to be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost.
Not everyone needs that much sleep, others need more. I think a better suggestion is finding out what an appropriate amount of sleep is and stick to it. For instance, unless I’m stressed or sleep deprived, I tend to wake up refreshed with around 5-6 hours of sleep and I wake up feeling tired when I sleep much more than that. I do like to take a nap later in the day, so it’s not like I’m only getting that much sleep total.
Yeah, pre-sleep routines are good and generally one should try to avoid using electronics. Meditation isn’t just for sleep though.
Yeah, not eating sugar is generally good advice backed up by lots of research, but the rest of that is a modern fad diet without a lot to back it up.
What does this even mean? Don’t overdo cardio? Well, yeah. But one NEEDs to do cardio for overall health. Too many people don’t do it right or skip it altogether, but not being clear what you mean here, I can’t even comment on whether it’s good or bad advice.
What? No. This is such broad advice as to be useless. How one weight trains, what exercises to do in what orders and how much weight for how many reps and how many sets depends on what one’s goals are. Yes, proper form is more important than amount of weight or number of reps.
If you’re going to do sprints, and generally that’s a good idea for most workout plans, 10-30 seconds is no where near enough. One should do sets of sprints.
Do cardio? Sure. Presumably, I’d take this to mean try to do something active outdoors. Going for a walk is awesome. If you’re jogging outdoors, biking, swimming, playing tennis, all of that is good too. Spend time outside and being active.
Understand the purpose and ingredients of ALL products and chemicals you use, not just cosmetics. This includes food, cleaning agents, drugs, vitamins whatever.
GMO isn’t inherently bad; in fact, sometimes is far healthier than the alternative. Do your research, don’t rely on broad-brush assumptions like this.
If you don’t know what you’re buying or how to prepare it, you’re not helping yourself. Again, do research.
If you have a proper diet, you don’t need any supplements. Most of us, even the most studious fail, so we should research what our deficiencies are based upon our diets, needs, and activities and supplement appropriately. Some people supplement stuff they don’t need and are, at best, literally pissing away money, or at worst, subtly poisoning themselves with things that can be harmful in too large amounts.
Good advice for some people, for others, not so much. Some people are distracted by that while working. Some people enjoy sitting down with a book. Some people don’t enjoy reading (or listening to) books at all.
Generic recommendations for books, especially in a mish-mash of good and bad advice isn’t something I’m going to take without at least a reason why you’d recommend it.
You can’t just DO these things. Confidence takes time to build up. One cannot just decide to be confident and be that. There are steps to building confidence. And, similarly, demolishing one’s ego is a BAD thing. One shouldn’t be over-confident or have an inflated ego, but lack of confidence and self-worth are consequences of a deflated ego. The point is one should attempt to have a realistic understanding of one’s strengths and weakeness, be willing to be humble where appropriate, but also be willing to stand up for oneself when appropriate too. Regardless, this takes work, a lot of work.
Again, such generic advice as to be nearly useless. We should ALL be taking stock of our strengths and weaknesses and trying to learn and grow, but simply telling people to do this doesn’t help. And, more, there’s not always a “fix” for aspects of things we see as flaws, sometimes it’s just accepting or finding ways to redirect it, and even when there is, it’s sometimes work that needs help from others.
For example, consider compassion. This can be a strength if it leads one to be charitable and help others, but it can also be a weakness when one is manipulated through it. The “fix” isn’t to be less compassionate. I’ve seen people see certain aspects of who they are as weaknesses, strive to fix them without considering what that means, and actually come out the other side MORE flawed.
What? As if we have control over our emotions. We can change how we act in response to emotions, like not deciding to just jump in headfirst because someone makes our heart flutter, but we can’t make someone not make us feel a certain way.
Any relationship, romantic, friend, family, business associate, teacher, whatever… they ALL require work to maintain. At the same time, one should be evaluating relationships to see if they are still meaningful and be willing to change the nature of that relationship or let it go if doesn’t serve the two of you. Far too often I’ve seen people, myself included, absolutely sure they can make a relationship work and pour tons of energy into it, and it just makes the situation worse
This is something that should be part of one’s education growing up. If you don’t know how you learn by the time you’re an adult, that’s a serious problem and definitely worth addressing. Rather, I think the issue is that people generally already know how they learn, but they try to do it in a way that doesn’t work for them. If you don’t learn from reading, don’t waste your time trying to read dry educational materials. If you need to take notes or hear lectures or do practice work or experiments… DO it.
Speed reading is a double-edged sword. You get through it faster but you retain less information. If you want to read faster, there are a few techniques, like learning to silence the inner voice (which I, personally, suck at), but beyond that, the best way to get good at it is todo more of it.
Well… yeah. We’re all doing that. It’s not enough to just pick things to improve, it’s about figuring out what the best version of YOU is and striving for that. For instance, I’ve never fenced before, so I could take fencing lessons and improve my fencing skill. That would be an improvement in a way I can think of, but it would also not be helping make the best version of ME as I see myself or in who I want to be. This comes back to knowing oneself and having a clear vision of where one wants to be.
Make good friends with people of BOTH genders. Hold onto the ones that help you both grow and let go of the ones that don’t.
Aggression in many ways is a good thing. One should aggressively pursue one’s dreams and passions. Based on the rest of the context, I think you mean violence. If that’s the case, yes, violence should be avoided as much as possible, but one shouldn’t be afraid to use it appropriately in self-defense or defense of others.
This goes back to analyzing one’s relationships and holding on to ones that are worth holding onto and letting go of ones that aren’t. I think repeating variations on a theme is more confusing than helpful.
Don’t be a luddite. Okay, fair enough. I’d rather have a broader approach of being willing and able to embrace positive change, including technology, social, cultural, and personal changes, but also being aware of the implications of those changes and being willing and able to resist changes that aren’t good.
Risk is important, but it’s about calculated risk. What all judge as a acceptable risk is going to be different in different circumstances. To a certain extent, we need some people to play it safe, on the other hand, we need some people who are risk takers. For example, without some people willing to bet big, some major and massively positive changes wouldn’t happen, particularly with massive investments in technologies. But that needs to be balanced out by people more risk averse or life would be FAR too turbulent.
What is a vision board? Is this just having a well-defined vision for one’s life?
It’s a little late for most of us to have mentors for primary school. More importantly, one isn’t limited to one mentor in a given stage or in a given realm. For example, in college and grad school, I had several professors I looked up to as mentors, others were just people who taught me things related to a class I signed up for. Ditto at work, some actually helped me become a better person, others just gave me work related knowledge. Really, we should all strive to have as many positive influences on our lives as possible.
Again, this isn’t just something one can do. It takes an enormous amount of work to discover one’s purpose. Some people know it early in life, some people spend a lifetime searching and never find anything. Sure, when one has found it, it’s a good idea to trim the fat to make focusing on that purpose easier, but for many of us, it’s not so simple.
So, sure, for some people they’re fulfilled by having a family or having a certain hobby or career or some combination. For others, it’s something far more esoteric and difficult to grasp. And I think how one discovers that can change from person to person. It’s really easy for someone that knew from a young age they wanted something for their life, it was all well laid out for them and they eventually achieve it to find it. For others, I know plenty who have a general idea but it takes them years of experimentation and trying different things to find out precisely what it is. For others, they had well-intentioned people set them down the wrong path and it can take years to figure that out and then correct for it.
If I died tomorrow, I’d only have a couple things undone that I would be unhappy knowing I hadn’t fulfilled, but we should ALWAYS be in such a state. We should always be improving and working on new things. If anything, it’s the moment that we feel fulfilled that life kind of stops having any real meaning. I’d like to believe that, to my dying day, I’ve always been improving myself, others around me, and the world I leave behind. I want to die happy with what I’ve accomplished in my life, but also a little disappointed I couldn’t finish what I was working on or get just a little more done.
http://makeavisionboard.com/what-is-a-vision-board/
It’s a board with images of your goal or goals. Not a bad idea for people who like that sort of thing, but certainly not general purpose good advice. Many people aren’t wired that way, and I’ve seen no evidence that it works. And if your vision sucks, your vision board won’t do much good.
Like the vast majority of the advice on the list, it’s not generally applicable nor has the OP articulated why one would want to follow his advice. Some of it is OK advice, some is harmless but not actionable, and some is outright wrong. Reading the one about GMO food pretty much made me doubt anything in the whole list, as he clearly wasn’t researching any of his advice.
There is a feller named Jim that I have repeatedly been advised to not mess around with.
mmm
To be fair to our OP, he didn’t say “a night”. My uncle Xavier used to boast about only needing to sleep 4h; one day for some reason several of us pointed out that maybe he should count his daily naps as well? When he stopped laughing, his brother JM (a merchant captain) said that pattern of sleeping in two similar chunks spaced half a day apart is perfect for a sailor.
Not all of us can sleep whichever hours are best for us personally, but knowing which ones they are is a necessary step in trying to achieve that goal. I know too many people who don’t appear to be conscious of their own personal rythms at all: they’ll do things like force themselves to be in front of work early when all that means is that they stare at it for hours before their brain actually becomes vertical, or stay at work when there is no way they’ll produce anything worthy.
While celebrating his graduating High School, I counseled my nephew to “distibute your semen carefully.” Twenty-plus years later I’m proud to say he followed my unsolcited advice.
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."
Blaster Master, thank you for taking the time to read and comment through my post. I agree with you on most points and I’m making corrections to my advice list based on your notes.
Yes, I meant overdoing aerobic exercise. Here’s why I think it’s bad:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-evidence-continues-to-mount-against-chronic-cardio
Telemark, it doesn’t matter to me if anyone follows my advice. I’m just sharing what I think is important. Half of it may be wrong and another part not applicable but there might be at least one OK advice which someone can find useful and that will make my efforts worth it. All I wanted was to not keep those to myself. I wasn’t expecting people to correct me so I can improve on those parts, but that’s most welcomed. If someone is curious about the updated list - PM me.
I couldn’t disagree more with these two (I think one of the most efficient things you can do is use biphasic or other sleep methods to get sleep down to as low a % of the day as possible whilst still feeling well rested, and look up with GMO means - it’s not a bad thing and as humans we have been doing it for thousands of years)
Other than that - some good to very great advice in there, especially not wasting time on unworthy people, especially since some people you initial want to impress end up being the worst of the lot.
A few to add from my experience -
How about “Don’t spread advice that you haven’t made an effort to find out if it’s good advice.” ?
GunnarFranz, thank you for appreciating part of my post.
A few hours ago I edited those two, with which you disagree with.
I thought they’re all good advice. Truly. I wrote them down to tell them to my kid someday. It took me long time to make those up and I did put effort into checking their validity. After collecting opinions in the last few days, I modified many of them. I am wrong sometimes, but I correct myself. I couldn’t do this last step of proofing them by myself because I saw them as good a week ago before I posted them on the Internet. I’m really glad of all the help many of you gave towards improving my list.
A couple of decades ago, the Nebraska Department of Education ran a survey of students listing about 80 lifestyle questions. Of all the questions, there was only one that had a significant positive correlation with high academic achievement: Family eating meals together. (No link, going from memory on that one.)
If one person reads this and takes it to heart and adjusts her lifestyle accordingly, I will consider my day well spent.
While I’ve got your attention, this one appears to be attributable to Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh: “The best thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother.” Nothing else a father can do is more important or positively influential on the development of his children.
To the extent that I turned out fairly satisfactory, I can attest to both of those.
Regarding oil changes - you can pay a bit now or pay a lot later.
Also, studies comparing house size and number of rooms to family happiness found out that the only important thing is having enough bathrooms for the number of people in the house. Anything else folks can easily adjust to.
Why 7 and a half hours of sleep? That seems oddly specific. Not 7 hours, not 8 hours but 7.5. Sounds like you just pulled that number from where the sun don’t shine.