3 early life lessons and their application.

If there is something there’s plenty of in this world, it’s pieces of advice.

We’ve all heard tons and tons of motivational phrases and quotes; so many, in fact, that they cancel out and leave you just where you were.

That is why today I’m going to do away with that and distill, in my opinion, the three biggest pieces of knowledge that have an actual application and have proven massively useful to me.

They’re not merely nice words; who cares about nicety more than functionality?

So, let’s start with the first, and maybe most important piece: “take your own advice”.

What this means is to, you could say, practice what you preach.

If you’ve adopted a certain mentality, or approach, or ideal, make sure to live up to it and not ignore it when the time to put it to the test comes.

Namely, if you explicitly acknowledge that you hold a certain idea as a tool and guiding principle, make sure to use it that way and listen to it!

For example, say you’ve heard the phrase “do onto others as you would have them do onto you“, which means to treat others as you’d like them to treat you. But then, somebody’s behaviour bothers you a bit, and you become rude and mean toward them; you are ignoring your own advice.

Or, in the gym (for the sake of talking about training), you become of the opinion that you should never try to push a PR beyond that which you had planned, in order not to rush the process. But then, you were at 90 kg on the bench, you are supposed to push to 95, but instead decide to push directly to 100kg, and injure yourself; you ignored your own advice and faced the consequences.

And that is the most important part: avoiding self-hypocrisy. It’s alright to make mistakes, we all know that; but at least try not to make mistakes of which you are aware and have explicitly said you’d avoid!

This is the most important and directly applicable piece of the three, since it is a reminder that all the wisdom in the world is useless if we don’t apply it and keep on making the same errors and living the same way.

Moving on, the second nugget of advice for today (second in importance too, for if you don’t take it into consideration, as in the previous part, it will be of no use) is this: “if you can’t afford the downside, don’t do it“.

An example here should help; suppose that you put all of your money into an investment, and you’re left with $0 for a while. It could go well, and it could pay off. But if it doesn’t, you will be financially destroyed, maybe forever: you can’t afford the downside.

The point here is that, no matter how big you could get to win, if losing would throw you out of the game forever, then don’t try. It’s important to win, yes, but to keep playing is of even greater importance.

Another situation would be going for a hike on a stormy day without enough preparation; it could be that you get through it just fine and had fun, but it could also be that the storm closes in and you find yourself in a life-or-death situation; the worst-case is too bad to risk it.

You could say that a decent approximation to this advice would be “don’t do stupid things“; don’t do things you know could ruin your life, or financial situation, or relationships, etc.

The clearest examples would be doing addictive drugs, anything that has a probable chance of getting you injured or dead (like reckless driving), financial fraud, or anything that could get you in prison, and so on.

Supposing you haven’t got arrested, and are practicing what you preach, last, but not least, comes the third one: “take advice from above, ignore critiques from below“.

The key to progress is staying humble enough to let the experts guide you, but also arrogant enough to not let those who you’ve left behind drag you down.

If someone has a life you’d want to live, you had better listen to that person; it may well be that that life requires you to be like them.

On the contrary, never listen, or at least not too deeply, to someone whose life you would not want to live, or whose values you do not share, or who you would not want to be like. Because if you do listen, you will become alike.

An example (a gym example, for fanatism’s sake): You are doing an exercise, and a guy bigger, leaner, and with a better overall progression approaches you and gives you some advice, some corrections. Then, another person, a man skinnier and weaker than you tries to give you advice too. The advice they both gave you seems rather controversial and unconventional; who should you listen to, if anyone?

No matter what the advice was, out of mere probability and proof, it is almost certain that the guy bigger than you has more knowledge and is right.

Maybe the skinny man was right; but he has no proof that his approach works.

So, since the first guy has a physique you’d want to have, you listen to him, and maybe take the second man’s advice under consideration and try it here and there, but take it with a grain of salt.

The important thing is to not let people that you don’t admire, or at least look up to, change the way you behave, since you don’t want to be like them, while also not being cocky and actually having people you look up to and are willing to learn from.

Thus, patching everything together, you have to, not be stupid (2nd piece), learn from people better than you and ignore haters lesser than you (3rd piece), and most importantly, listen to yourself (1st piece)!

The advice is, as promised, sound and general, and not some platitude about how to find the meaning of life.

Hope you enjoyed this post! Stay tuned for more every Sunday, and make sure to share and subscribe!