Category: Life lessons — 218
Do Not Educate Strangers
Everyday morality demands that you answer rudeness so that the offender does not “get used to it.” That turns a chance encounter into an educational project for which nobody issued…
The size of the container
Work knows how to fill the time allotted to it. Cyril Northcote Parkinson published his formula about work expanding to fill the time available for it in 1955 as a…
Fraud Without Shame
The public stereotype explains fraud by the victim’s greed and stupidity. In fact scammers use fear, love, urgency, authority and the wish to help — qualities that are not vices…
The Second Life of Things
A new thing is at its most expensive at the moment it stops being new. After the first unboxing, the first trip or the first scratch, a large part of…
People on Autopilot
Most everyday behaviour is automatic. People repeat familiar phrases, ask questions without being ready to hear the answer, and defend an opinion that formed before the arguments did. This does…
Swimming in water
Educational culture sometimes behaves as if it were enough to read the right book and understand the right formula. Knowledge really can be got from a text; skill appears only…
The Invisible Shore
The hardest thing to take into account is not what we do not know but what we do not suspect exists. A person sees the boundary of his own knowledge…
Plan B does not invite disaster
Superstitious common sense sometimes treats preparing for a bad scenario as a sign of distrust or a way to “tempt fate”. A backup, a first aid kit and a second…
Money Between People
Money is good at turning vagueness into resentment. A borrowed sum means temporary help to one person, a gift to another and a test of friendship to a third. All…
Appearance Without a Verdict
Society is happy to make appearance both a personal duty and grounds for a verdict. A person is invited to “be themselves”, and then their clothes, body and grooming are…
Simple comes after complex
Society likes simple answers and particularly likes calling them a mark of genius. “Everything great is simple” sounds best once somebody else has done the difficult work. A good explanation…
Don’t Burn Bridges for Motivation
Irreversibility sometimes creates resolve. That is exactly why people quit before looking for a new job, put all their money into a project or publicly promise a result. Once the…
Debt Buys the Future
Debt lets you use tomorrow’s money today. That can be sensible. Education raises income. Equipment starts turning a profit. Housing gives stability. A short-term loan covers a cash gap. At…
Your partner’s parents
Meeting your partner’s family isn’t a competition for approval. It is a mutual gathering of information. The family shows you: which ways of having a conflict count as normal, how…
Love without workplace dependence
Romantic culture loves stories in which love overcomes asymmetries of rank, age and money. In reality dependence mixes consent with fear of the consequences. Relationships are especially risky where dependence…
Mistake and Cause
The popular cult of the mistake suggests celebrating every misstep as a free lesson. Mistakes are unavoidable, but they don’t become useful automatically. After a mistake, a person knows that…
Doubt Is a Signal, Not a Verdict
Doubt is useful when it reports a risk you have not accounted for. Before overtaking, transferring money, signing a contract or taking an irreversible step, the inner sense that something…
The Individuality of Mass Production
Advertising invites you to express your uniqueness with a product that is simultaneously being sold to millions of people. There is an obvious contradiction in this, but not complete nonsense.…
A Pause Before Agreeing
Pressure loves urgency. The less time there is to think, the harder it is to check the terms, get advice and notice that the offer suits mainly whoever set the…
Hand the Routine to the Machine
A computer is most useful not when a person does their usual work faster with its help, but when they stop doing the repeatable part by hand. Calculations, sorting, renaming…