
What life lessons are unintuitive or go against common sense or wisdom? - sajithw
http://www.quora.com/What-life-lessons-are-unintuitive-or-go-against-common-sense-or-wisdom
======
edw519
OK, let me give this a shot...

In the past year or two, I have learned my greatest life lesson. As a lifelong
high achiever, it was extremely counter-intuitive yet it was right in front of
me all along. First, a little background...

In the past couple of years:

    
    
      - My father died.
      - My aunt (and best friend) died.
      - My cousin (who was really like my brother) died.
      - My 19 year old cat died.
      - We had our first ever family reunion.
      - My mother's dimentia has turned her back into a child.
      

Sure we all have great memories and are busy working at building even better
futures, but ultimately it all boils down to:

All we have is now.

My pets have been trying to teach me this for years, if only I had listened.
And now my mother is teaching me. They don't really remember yesterday. They
don't care about tomorrow. But they really care about the moment. Intensely.

I have had to really slow down and let this sink in. When I visit my mother in
her nursing home, we have a great time laughing, talking, visiting others, and
of course, playing Jeopardy. We can't have the conversations we used to, so we
just have new experiences, one time only, in the moment, and only for those
who are there. We never talk about the past and she simply doesn't understand,
"I'll see you tomorrow."

I haven't stopped building my future, but I no longer sacrifice the present in
order to get there. I have learned that the process must be as enjoyable as
the outcome. After all, the process is "now" and the outcome is just an
instant in time.

It may sound cliche, but everyone should take inventory of all the good stuff
in their lives (especially other people) and make the most of it _now_. You'll
be surprised how quickly it'll be gone. Don't wait half your life to learn my
most valuable counter-intuitive lesson.

~~~
ihodes
It does sound cliché. And, respectfully, I think it's just as wrong [Edit: not
wrong, but maybe shortsighted. Then again, if what I say in the following
paragraphs doesn't change your view in the slightest, then more power to you:
my view isn't the absolute. Do what you think is "right", whatever right might
be.] as most clichés tend to be.

We have now, certainly, and now is amazing. But we have the past, too; at
least for a while (dementia and all sorts of other things can rob us of the
past). We have the future, too (though we can be robbed of that).

 _I live for all three._ The past is where I draw from to inform my present
actions; the present is where I enjoy myself and prepare for the future; the
future is where we're all heading.

If I lived for the now, I wouldn't be going to college. I wouldn't be planning
to study for a PhD in Neuroscience and researching assistive brain/spine
implants. I wouldn't study programming languages and designs. I wouldn't be
reading The Intelligent Investor. In fact, if you lived for the now, you'd
probably be living in a soma-induced haze à la Huxley's Brave New World: it'd
be the optimal choice, in fact. Pure neurochemical bliss.

The argument that you should live for now because you could be dead at _any_
second is obscene, to me: it's more likely that you live than you die, and
you're likely to be consistently happier now and in the future if you act like
you'll be alive in the future. Evidence: planning for retirement. Seriously.

So live for yourself, sure, but live for all of yourself. Think of yourself as
a smudge on a timeline: not in one place, not just in the past, not just in
the future. Optimize the smudge.

~~~
nostrademons
"If I lived for the now, I wouldn't be going to college. I wouldn't be
planning to study for a PhD in Neuroscience and researching assistive
brain/spine implants. I wouldn't study programming languages and designs. I
wouldn't be reading The Intelligent Investor. In fact, if you lived for the
now, you'd probably be living in a soma-induced haze à la Huxley's Brave New
World: it'd be the optimal choice, in fact. Pure neurochemical bliss."

Living for the now doesn't mean being a dopamine junkie.

I went to college knowing that it was basically useless for what I wanted to
do with my life. I went because it was time - all the adults around me said
that I'd be missing out on an awesome experience if I didn't, and while I was
a little skeptical, I figured I'd give it a try. That, and the economy was
about to enter the shitter (it was 2001), and the company I was working at was
about to lay off 40% of its workforce.

I majored in physics because I liked the feeling of sitting out on my roof
with sunshine on my face (yeah, New England, it didn't last very long),
textbook in my lap, working on really hard math problems. As it turned out, I
didn't like it enough to stick with it. I then majored in computer science
because I had found out that I liked it enough to spend my weekends working on
compilers and my late nights reading up on programming language design. At the
time I did those, I was a physics major, and they were completely irrelevant
to anything that might possibly advance my degree or career. But they were
fun.

I read The Intelligent Investor because I'd just started working at a
financial software startup, had an hour long commute, and figured it might be
more fun to figure out what I'd just gotten myself into rather than stare at
the silent faces on the train. As it turned out, after reading The Intelligent
Investor I didn't much like what I'd gotten myself into at all, which is why
I'm not in finance now.

In one of Paul Graham's essays, he says that you can tell an adult from a
child because an adult will tend to "lean into" challenges, accepting them as
part of who they are instead of shrinking back from them. There's nothing that
prevents you from building the habit of leaning into challenges into your
daily identity. It doesn't particularly matter what those challenges are, it
matters that you attack them. If you build this habit, you'll usually do
fairly well even if you don't make a master plan for your life. Heck, you'll
probably do better than people who do create a master plan, because life has a
way of biting you in the ass and tearing your plans to shreds.

~~~
dmoney
This appears to be the essay you're talking about:
<http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html>

_The other way to tell an adult is by how they react to a challenge. Someone
who's not yet an adult will tend to respond to a challenge from an adult in a
way that acknowledges their dominance. If an adult says "that's a stupid
idea," a kid will either crawl away with his tail between his legs, or rebel.
But rebelling presumes inferiority as much as submission. The adult response
to "that's a stupid idea," is simply to look the other person in the eye and
say "Really? Why do you think so?"_

------
1010011010
Never help the cops. This includes never talking to the cops.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik> \-- Part 1
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08fZQWjDVKE> \-- Part 2

~~~
Joakal
Pretty much only applies in USA.

~~~
StrawberryFrog
So you'd be happy to say anything to cops in any corrupt 3rd-world country
then?

~~~
adrianN
In such a country, not talking to the cops is not necessarily better.

------
diN0bot
"retirement is boring" is only true if the current way you spend your free
time is boring. i love my free time and i know from experience that having
more of it simply allows me to learn and achieve more of what i want. maybe
these hobbies would become professional if they were full time, maybe not.
people are different and spend their free time in different ways.

(wrt free time, i would say: stop procrastinating! i'm lucky, because i
naturally prefer to work immediately and then be able to spend my free time
exactly as i prefer, rather than wasting time and working under pressure near
deadlines. if you can figure out how to trade your procrastination time for
real pleasure, then you win both now and later.)

~~~
nostrademons
More accurately, "retirement is boring" is only true if your job is more
interesting than your free time. I love my free time. I currently love my job
more, mostly, and so I often end up doing work things in my free time. At this
point, "retirement" would be a net loss even aside from the money issue. This
will probably change once I've learned everything there is to learn at my job,
but YMMV.

------
phugoid
There's a class of situations where the more you want something, the less
likely you are to get it.

Desperation puts you at a disadvantage when you're looking for a mate or a
job. People who can fake disinterest have the advantage over those with
genuine neediness.

Yet, I would think that honesty and sincerity are key attributes of mates and
employees.

~~~
yef
Absolutely true. Maybe I'm mincing words but there is a corollary here too.
There is a class of situations where the harder you try, the bigger the
disadvantage you have. This can be hard for workaholic types to understand.

Class A (Effort correlates with results) = Work, school, etc.

Class B (Ease correlates with results) = Socializing, dating, etc.

------
Kilimanjaro
Have as many kids as you can. Only they can give you the happiest and saddest
moments of your life. And to better understand life, you need to know and go
both extremes. Every smile is a hug to your heart, every tear is a kick to
your soul. At the end of the journey, they will be the real treasure of your
existence.

------
donnyg107
A few weeks ago I decided that all common life lessons are only notable
because they are unintuitive, go directly against millions of years of human
development. Don't judge a book by its cover, don't count your chickens before
they hatch, etc. I feel like all these phrases came about as condescending
told-you-so's rather than actual meaningful guidelines.

------
klochner
That thread points out a huge problem with the quora format - ideally people
could vote up suggestions on a per-item basis, so that the community could
collectively produce the best list of items.

Instead people produce long-winded all-encompassing content-duplicating posts,
so we end up with a jumbled mess of data.

------
InclinedPlane
One thing I haven't seen yet:

Generally, in most companies you have as much authority as you dare. The best
way to get promoted is to just start doing the job you want to have and then
have your title changed later. The idea that the organization and leadership
of a company flows in exactly the manner the org chart specifies is a complete
and utter fallacy. In reality, in most companies there is a lot of leadership
coming from unexpected places, especially at a tech. company. If you sit back
and wait for authority to be given to you that'll almost never happen, if you
start spearheading worthwhile initiatives and start being an advocate for
useful change, you'll get that authority in practice before you get it
officially.

~~~
GFischer
That can lead to a lot of inefficiency and friction, and people ditching their
jobs for the jobs they'd like to do.

How do I know? At my current company, the IT department currently has no
formal boss. So a few ambitious people decided they'd rather not do the boring
programming work, and take advantage of the void. But they don't feel like
being called to task. The current climate is far from ideal, and there's a lot
of backstabbing going on, and if you feel responsible (for maintaining the
invisible legacy systems for example), you lose to the ambitious guys.

On the plus side, I'm learning a lot about social dynamics :) . I've given up
on advancing here, but the experience will be useful.

------
eoghan
"You can't be anything you want to be."

I believe in this very strongly.

~~~
Maro
There are things that mostly depend on you, like studying hard in school or
training for and finishing an Ironman.

There are other things where external conditions (like where you're located,
whom you know, how wealthy you are, what your competitors are doing) are very
strong factors and are hard to work around.

~~~
tomjen3
All but one of those "external" factors can be worked around based on your
actions.

~~~
Maro
But it's very hard to do in terms of knowing how to do it. Most people here on
HN know what it takes to get good grades or work out, but even here on HN not
everyone is good at networking, not everyone can relocate to SV (eg. because
you have a family or don't get a Visa), not everyone can afford to repeatedle
try again with a new company. Also, when I said "wealthy" I meant "how wealthy
is your family", as in how big a risk can you afford to take.

Where I live (E.Europe) I find most tech entrepeneurs are from somewhat
wealthy families (= they don't have to worry about getting a 9-5 job, but
they're not driving around in sportcars), so they're motivated but get to take
bigger risks, don't have to worry about making a steady income, and also
receive free networking from their parents, who are usually also businessman.

You can still try to work around these problems, in fact I have tried to, but
you're taking on very large risks which are hard to control. Eg. if you're
supporting your startup with contract work because there's no VC money around,
and your contracts dry up, then what. Or, if your competition, located in
another part of the world gets VC money and speeds away in terms of hype (not
even the product), then what.

------
heyitsnick
I hate to be negative and there's some good advice here, but really a lot of
this is just replacing old unresearched assumptions with newer pronouncements
that are similarly without any reference. At best these are left un-sourced,
at worst they seem to be based purely on personal experience. Yet most of
these are or could be topics of unbias study. A few examples:

 _Buy a nice bed. Buy a very nice mattress and high-thread-count sheets. You
will need to test out a variety of mattresses to find the one that fits you
best but if you find the right one, it will greatly enhance the quality of
your sleep, and subsequently, your waking life._

Why is it that more expensive mattresses = better sleep? Cite the evidence
showing that high thread-count sheets = better sleep, which in tern laeds to
improvements in waking life.

 _You can accomplish more if you work less and sleep more. Hypothetically a
well-rested person working 55-hour work weeks can usually outperform a sleep-
deprived person working 80-hour work weeks in terms of quality, all else equal
(specifically for knowledge work)._

Hypothetically this isn't true at all. Is there evidence to support this
hypothesis or not? If not, this adds nothing to the debate.

 _You can pay the farmer, or you can pay the doctor. Prevention (i.e. good
diet and food ingredients) is an order of magnitude cheaper than treatment
(most age-related diseases are correlated with poor dietary choices)._

This is trite and catch-all. What is good diet? There is no common agreement
(see: high carb/high protein/high fat discussions). Show the evidence that
this is 'an order of magnitude' cheaper than treatment. What are 'good
ingredients'. You recommend free-range meats? Grass-fed beef? Locally
produced? Define 'good'.

 _A cheap chair and mattress may end up costing you 10-20x in doctor's bills._

Says who? 10-20x seems pretty specific - what's the citation on that? A
'cheap' chair - so is price the only metric? Any $2000 chair is worth it and
saves money on doctor's bills? Doesn't it matter how often i spend sitting?
Could there not be cheap chairs that are actually better than many expensive
ones? What's an 'expensive' mattress?

 _Spoken communication has a massive non-verbal component. Study body language
and you'll be pretty shocked at how often peoples' spoken words contradict
their telltale non-verbal cues._

Citation please. A lot of the 'non-verbal communication' stuff (read: NLP) is
considered unscientific gumf.

Don't get me wrong, there's some great advice in here. But around half is
stuff that can be scientifically demonstrated and just off-handedly saying
something is invalid whilst proclaiming the opposite without providing any
citations is counter-productive. It just encourages "common knowledge" of the
same old wives tales and folklore that it itself is trying to counteract.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Oh, spare us. Playing at Mr. Citation Needed is _not_ a form of smartness and
is in fact a pernicious sort of bias. If you are too afraid of being wrong,
you'll miss out on the benefits of being right.

~~~
heyitsnick
I'm not playing Mr. Citation.

If you re-read my comment I explicitly say that there is some great
information here. When people simply give advice based on their history -
things like "use your money to live closer to work" is good advice. You don't
need a citation for this; it's just someone's advice and it's good advice.
"Perhaps you haven't considered the great benefits from using your money to
cut down your commute time; you may reflect how negative the daily commute is"
is an excellent suggestion.

However the specific advice I quoted, e.g. "Buy a more expensive bed", "eat
'good' food", is useless, potentially harmful advice without citation.

Already there are responses to my parent comment about how they found an in-
expensive bed is actually preferrable. It would be infinitely more useful if
someone actually discussed recent research in to different beds as advice.
Anecdotal recommendations in this area are useless _and_ ironically they
propagate the same folklore of 'common wisdom' that this quora question
_specifically_ mentioned in the title: "advice... against common sense or
wisdom".

------
JeanPierre
_Happiness = Outcome - Expectations. The key to enjoying life is keeping
expectations low to the degree that you're always pleasantly surprised._

I find this a bad advice due to many different reasons. First and foremost,
startups must have high expectations in order to, well, start up. People would
never, ever create a company _assuming_ it would go straight to hell after six
months.

What also bothers me with this statement is that, by keeping expectations low,
you would _probably_ not work as much as you would if you had higher
expectations.

As a final note, I have always kept my expectations very, very high. I always
aim for A's at university. Yet, I do not feel less happy than the average Joe,
even though I sometimes get a B or a C.

~~~
michael_dorfman
I think you are mistaking "expectations" and "ambitions".

 _by keeping expectations low, you would probably not work as much as you
would if you had higher expectations._

I think the opposite is true-- there are many startups that have failed
because they _expected_ the traffic to be there when they launched, because
they _expected_ the world to sit up and take notice, instead of realizing that
there was a lot of hard work they had to do to get it. Lower expectations, in
this case, leads to harder work (and a higher likelihood of success.)

------
jimmyjazz14
"Money CAN buy happiness", have a child and suddenly the value of having money
goes up a hundred fold. The desire to make lots of money is not always based
on greed!

~~~
joshkaufman
I just had a daughter, and experienced the opposite. We're beyond the point of
financial sufficiency, and I could make a lot more money if I chose to work
more.

What I really want is more time every day to spend with her AND get work done.

~~~
jimmyjazz14
For me having more money means I can work less and therefore focus more time
on my child more.

~~~
joshkaufman
My work is very fulfilling - that's why I want to do both.

------
pasbesoin
There is an inverse relationship between the extent to which someone labels
themself as an authority and the extent to which they actually are an
authority.

Corollary: Be particularly wary of medical "experts".

Second, and self-referential, corollary: Be particularly wary of "bitter"
people and comments.

------
petervandijck
If you have long-term dreams and can visualize them, they tend to work out,
but the path of how you get there is often surprising and unexpected.

------
yason
In life, you first have the test and then you learn. In many modern
institutions we're accustomed to it being vice versa.

------
megablast
"Self promotion works" i do not believe this one. If you are any good, you do
not need to talk yourself up, as others will do it for you.

~~~
patio11
This is difficult to square with the evidence. Many good people, for any
definition of good, are not talked about. Many people who are talked about
have no externally verifiable accomplishment which would point to them being
good, aside from being talked about.

I have a bit of the engineer skepticism about self-promotion, but to the
extent that I have a positive reputation that continues to open doors for me,
it is partially because I'm talented and largely because I have worked hard
and effectively for years at marketing myself. (Only partially consciously at
points. It turns out that helping people and writing well are both really
effective methods of self-promotion.)

~~~
tomjen3
helping people is always a good thing, but the troubble with good writting is
that there is no good way to get better. Once you have mastered spelling and
grammar, it is very difficult to improv.

A better tactic may be to write tolerably and have someting interesting to
say.

~~~
nostrademons
That's not true at all. There's wide variation on the quality of writers even
if you restrict yourself only to those who can spell and use correct grammar.
Things like word choice, omitting adverbs and filler, sentence length,
organization into paragraphs, structure of the piece, transitions, use of
formatting, and supporting details all make for noticeable differences in how
easy it is to read.

Saying "there's no way to get better" is like saying "once you learn the
syntax of Java, you know everything there is to know about programming." It
just belies your ignorance of how much else there is to know.

~~~
tomjen3
I said there is no _good_ way to get better, by which I mean a way that you
can objectively measure whether what you are doing today is better than what
you were doing yesterday and most crucially of all: what you need to improve.

You can do that with programming since each choice you make gives a tradeof in
terms of speed, complexity, etc. I haven't seen a book with a similar set of
concerns with regards to writing.

~~~
blacksmythe

      >> that you can objectively measure whether what you are doing today is better than what you were doing yesterday and most crucially of all: what you need to improve.
    

It is hard to judge your own work, The best way is to get a friend to do it.

Another approach it to re-read your writing and compare it to early work.
Letting 6 months go by will allow you to re-read your work with fresh
perspective. Compare to what you wrote 2 years ago.

~~~
pjscott
The cheapest approach is to take a break for a little while, then come back
and re-read what you just wrote. Is it well-organized? Is anything phrased
awkwardly? Are there parts you can tighten up without losing anything?

Just taking the time to do this can make a huge difference in the quality of
your writing.

------
da5e
What you resist, persists.

------
Calamitous
All of them, it seems.

------
VB6_Foreverr
That there was a market for expired lightbulbs in the Soviet Union because
working ones were hard to source. People would bring the expired ones to work
and swap them for working ones.

There's a life lesson there somewhere.

~~~
rwmj
That communism is never going to work because it goes against human nature?

~~~
rwmj
Downvotes? Someone care to explain what's wrong with this?

------
bloggergirl
After reading through all the awesome comments on this thread on Quora, I
created a Prezi to summarize it all. I posted it as an answer summary.

But some guy named Richard Henry --- Quora Admin --- deleted it. Said it
wasn't a summary and was not useful.

Here it is, if you're interested in the summary:
<http://prezi.com/l1wuvbaya37o/quora-life-lessons/>

