Perfect is the enemy of good
You really can ruin a perfectly acceptable or even fine situation by trying to make it “better”.
It’s amazing how many people can’t successfully estimate travel times. It seems so easy to me: I know it’s a 15 minute walk to the subway station, about 20 minutes to get downtown on the train, and probably 10 minutes to walk if the restaurant is new to me. Why is that so hard for so many people?
Always refill the ice cube tray, you’ll love yourself later.
Everything that happens in your life can be useful, if you remember it at the appropriate time.
Bad moments do not have to make for bad days.
Any day you make someone laugh is not wasted.
Always tell the truth. Lying takes too much effort. You can annoy more people by telling the truth, because it’s not what they want to hear and they can’t refute it.
Set SMART goals and continually monitor and adjust them.
Today not possible…tomorrow possible.
Admit your mistakes. When you do, people are amazed and cannot say much more. People spend way too much time trying to justify stuff they did wrong.
Pick you battles wisely. People also spend way too much time on trivial matters that don’t mean shit.
Ah so, The Asoh Defense.
“Don’t live in the future.”
I always thought that I would work until a certain age, retire to a nice house, and enjoy my life with my wife. There would be plenty of family time. Work hard now and you’ll be golden in the golden years.
My wife died at age 44 of a brain tumor. My (current) wife’s husband died at age 46 of a brain tumor. Her parents and siblings all died before she retired. My father and his entire family passed before I retired.
TL;DR: The time is NOW. Don’t put off big plans, travel, or family time until it’s more convenient or you can afford it.
from my dad:
If you don’t have time to do it right, you will never find the time to do it over again.
The question that’s gotten me off my ass ever since it was first said to me when I was like 10: “What’s wrong with right now?”
“Don’t pass it by, pick it up.” These signs were everywhere when I worked for Safeway. If you’ve ever worked in retail you’re probably also familiar with them. I’ve carried this on at every other job I’ve ever had (which have not been retail) and my supervisors have always been impressed with the simple act of picking up a piece of trash and throwing it away when it wasn’t specifically my job to do so.
Along this line, I was once told “Good plans are better than bad plans, but any plan is better than no plan.”
I actually did this at a job interview once. The person who was giving me the tour of the building told people about it regularly until I left for a new job 3 years later, and I suspect may still be telling the story.
I didn’t do it to impress her. I did it out of habit - something on the floor, pick it up and throw it away - but apparently it kind of blew her mind that a job candidate would do that.
If you drop a knife, just let it fall.
Delegation without follow up is counter productive.
Similar to what others have said - “Leave it better than you found it”, told to us by our scout leader referring to campsites but applies much wider.
I’ve heard this one before and I must disagree. Is this the approach you’d like your doctor to take? “Sorry that your dead, I couldn’t decide what the problem was so I made a decision and unfortunately it was the wrong one”
Make a good decision, if you can’t you don’t have enough information so gather more.
No, this piece of advice is inviolable and should be applied in all situations indiscriminately without exception. It should in no way be taken as a very general guideline against the possibility of occasional indecisiveness. 
Best advice given to me by a supervisor:" If you never want to get laid off in this up and down industry, you don’t have to be the best, just be in the top 10%. Which is crazy easy to do."
25 years later, I’m still employed by the same company. And we’ve been through a LOT of layoffs.
Everybody’s life has problems all the time. You don’t know what other people have to deal with, and you don’t know what they have to deal with it.
RUN YOUR OWN BOAT!!! I don’t know who told me this, but doing it yourself and taking responsibility for your own life will save you time and makes you a better person. A friend once told me that she decided to befriend me when she was told “You can learn a lot from her. She takes care of herself.”
I can’t think of a cute way of phrasing it, but basically it’s “work a little harder now to make it easier later on”.
It’s taking the time to remove the old boxes of steaks from the shelf and put the new shipment underneath them, so that in a week’s time, when the steak shelf is empty, you just grab the top box and go.