I’ve heard this one many times, but I think Caesar Milan said it best: “Live in the now.” You don’t realize how much time you spend worrying about what’s coming or what happened. Living in the “now” frees your emotional resources and allows your mind to rest so it can handle what’s coming or deal with what happened.
This one is attributed to me: “Raise the bar.” Everybody knows that in anything you do, you should do it to the best of your abilities. However, I felt that doing it again also presented an opportunity to do it better. My coworkers picked up on this and verbalized it themselves.
Early in my career with a certain large Telco, my bosses’ boss said to me “ESS is where you want to be*.” At the time, I couldn’t help but think of the “Plastics” line from Mrs Robinson. As it turned out, the advice was quite valid and led to a series of good paying positions within the company and beyond.
*Electronic Switching Systems
I had a bad experience once in business. We had written up what I (and our lawyer) thought was a solid contract, and the weasel we were dealing with found a way to screw us anyway. I was infuriated, and I was griping to my father about it. He said, “If you can’t trust a man’s handshake, you can’t trust his contract either.”
Years later, I was still upset about the whole episode, and a friend said, “Holding a grudge is giving someone rent-free space in your head.”
A friend was wondering whether to save some cash, or spend it on a vacation he really wanted. Another friend advised, “What else are you going to do with that money? Line your casket with it?”
Point taken. There’s little point in saving too much money.
Another friend: “It’s not true that you get what you pay for. What’s true is that the most you can get is what you pay for.” Why, that’s so as well.
I don’t know where I got this one from: “Any problem that can be solved with money really isn’t that much of a problem.”
“The purpose of life is to live.” Rich Mullins told me this. There’s a whole explanation of it in religious terms: God created mankind to be what we are, & we glorify him by living as human beings can live, rather than by liturgical claptrap.
True on its face but have you ever known anyone who has saved too much money? Almost never happens. Much more common to underestimate what you need to retire.
Unless you don’t have the money. I’m not seeing the wisdom in that one.
This actually came from a professor’s syllabus on how to perform well in his class, paraphrased here:
“If you’re interested, pay attention. If you’re not interested, fake it.”
This has served me well in both academics and real life. Sometimes a friend or acquaintance is talking shop and I really could not give a shit about what they’re talking about. If I ask a couple questions though and act interested, sooner or later they’ve said something intriguing and I’ve learned something new.
Since the gist of the message is that people will usually overrate the sex they have, while not mentioning how satisfying a healthy dump can be, “…a bad fuck…” just doesn’t make sense.
I can’t wait to read the 154 answers so far but I had to skip ahead and offer this little gem. It came from a butcher i worked for, real down-to-earth guy who turned this then-whiny-teenager’s head 180 degrees.
“Excuses are like assholes: Everyone has one, and they all stink.”
I hate this saying so much. The opposite of love is hatred, full stop.
But I will go into it anyway. Love is a blanket term that encompasses a variety of positive emotional bonds and attachments. Likewise, hatred is a blanket term that encompasses a variety of negative emotional bonds and attachments. Indifference is the absence of any of these emotional bonds.
Now think about it in terms of color. The closest thing to an “opposite” of a color is the complementary color. In that sense, the opposite of blue is orange, as they both share similar properties but exist on different ends of the color spectrum. Then does it make sense to say the opposite of blue is black, the absence of color?
