This is a guest post written by Penny, a regular reader of our blog. Inspired by a recent article my father wrote entitled “What I Know at 64 that I Didn’t Know at 24”, Penny decided to write a list of her own. Here are 25 things she has learned over the last 30 years.
I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.
– Eartha Kitt
- Competition against individuals is really competition against the teams that support them.
- People become brainwashed by the media in the most basic ways. For instance, think about gender roles.
- Having good credit is crucial, because otherwise you will be bled to death by lenders when you need to borrow money.
- Medical doctors can be ill-informed, incompetent morons. They are just people.
- I get better scientific research done when I sleep more, calm down, and think less about social “motivators” and more about having fun.
- Adults are just older children.
- A great deal of history is eventually proven to be inaccurate.
- Many self-proclaimed experts are not experts.
- Any quick-fix scheme for relationship and social utopia is a scam. True happiness involves the long-term.
- Trusting your emotions can be dangerous.
- Life is not a video game, a play by Euripides, a short story, a TV episode or movie. It’s what YOU make of it.
- Gilding the lily leads to insanity.
- I may never be a great chess player, but I love it, so I should never stop playing.
- Bad schooling is a root cause of adult social problems. Misguided minds alter social reality.
- There are many times when popular science gets it wrong.
- If a book on physics doesn’t have more equations than text, throw it out!
- Common sense is baloney. What you really need is uncommon sense, often the product of uncommon experiences, ideas, or interacting with uncommon intellect.
- Many inventions and discoveries are credited to the wrong people. For example, Telsa didn’t invent the “Tesla`Coil”.
- Linux beats the sox off of Windows… and yes, Virginia–sometimes there really is a free lunch.
- Even if you can read it at 2000 wpm, you shouldn’t. Your mind cannot effectively absorb information at that pace.
- Discrimination is pervasive, insidious and real. Having an open mind and an open heart is vital to the progression of humanity.
- Beware of being seduced by overly “sensible” and “reasonable” sounding ideas or solutions. All angles must be evaluated first.
- Logic and arithmetic do not commute before breakfast.
- Doomsday never comes. Nor does absolute Utopia.
- I still haven’t a clue.