Reflections and Accumulated Practical Wisdom after 50 years of life

I turned 50 this month. Here is a list of random nuggets of practical wisdom I’ve learned/wished I’d known or am still unsure of.

A caveat: Unless you’re a Platoninst about knowledge, practical wisdom is not something we are born with but rather comes from experience. That is to say, for just about every nugget acquired, I made decisions and acted (sometimes repeatedly) in the opposite direction. So before you can accuse me of having acted at some point like a dumbass, an asshole, an idiot, and so on. Yes, you are right. You are more right than you will ever know. I’m not proud of it but, unfortunately, sometimes that’s how learning happens. I share these so others may avoid my many errors.

Practical Wisdom I’m Extremely Confident Is True (General):

1. Always take care of your feet. If you injure them, it will adversely affect almost every other aspect of your life.
   
2. Aristotle is right about just about everything when it comes to how to live a flourishing life. TLDR version:
   
   • Establish good habits (exercise, reading, writing, socializing, helping, etc…)
   • Life will inevitably have periods of shittiness. Your good habits will get you through. Without them, periods of shittiness will be even shitter and harder to overcome.
   • Without good friends, a fulfilling life is almost impossible. And good friendships require that you invest time and effort. After childhood, they don’t just happen. Invest in friendships. This usually means a quick check in from time to time. Only occasionally will friendship demand large commitments.
   • Pursue excellence. Don’t settle for mediocrity. But you don’t have to be excellent at everything all the time. That’s not possible (or if it is, it’s exhausting). Pick no more than 2-3 things at a time to pursue excellence in.
   • Be a life-long learner.
   • Engage with philosophy (this does not include “wellness” influencers). I’m talkin’ real philosophy.
     
3. The universe is indifferent to us and life can sometimes be very hard and lonely. Kindness to others (including animals) can overcome much of this and brings warmth into the world. Be kind to others. Just like friendship, this rarely demands grand acts of magnanimity. The smallest acts of kindness can carry another person for a week.
   
4. Tell people what you want. Don’t be evasive. But don’t be tactless either. There are good and bad ways to express your desires. Don’t expect people to read your mind.
   
5. Read. Reading quality books is necessary for a good life. It’s food for your brain. No food, brain no work good. Brain dumb.
   
6. Compete when you’re young. Most people do not ever find out just how good they can be at something. They either give up too early and underestimate how good you can become at something through consistent and persistent effort over several years. But it’s incredibly valuable to learn about yourself that you can overcome difficult obstacles through consistent hard work. This knowledge is something you can draw on when you face later challenges in life.
   
   When you’re young, you care more about reputation and proving yourself–and all that good stuff. As you age, you care less and less about what others think. But caring about what others think (especially people you’re attracted to) provides excellent motivation. So, when you’re young, use this bonus source of motivation to see how good you can become at something.
   
7. Talent is important but work ethic is more importanter in the long run. People begin life with different aptitudes and facility for various activities. But the gap between natural starting points is miniscule compared to the gap between someone who trains/studies/practices an activity regularly for several years.
   
   I’ve never understood the mentality of “oh, I’m not very good at x, so I’m going to do something else.” That’s a horrible reason not to do something. Pick whatever you want to do and dedicate yourself to it for several years. You’ll far surpass people who started ahead of you if they don’t practice/work/train as hard as you. Pick the things you want to do regardless of your natural aptitude for them.
   
8. If a relationship feels like work most of the time, get out. Don’t fall for the sunk cost bias.
   
9. Sometimes, life is really fucking hard and bad shit happens and the best you can do it make it through the day, week, or month and that’s OK. Corollary: Be kind to others, they may be having a bad day or week (or month). The habits you established prior to the bad periods in your life will get you through them. If you haven’t established good habits, it’s going to be much worse.
   
10. Schedule time for yourself at least once a week. Don’t say, I’ll find time. Put it in your schedule and stick to it no matter what (unless a friend really needs help).
    
11. Spend time in nature.
    
12. If you have a great family, count your lucky stars.

Practical Wisdom I’m Fairly Confident Is True (Health, Fitness, Martial Arts):

1. When possible, eat a salad before your main dish.
   
2. Avoid letting yourself get more than 2 weeks of training away from optimal health/fitness for you.
   
3. If you have an injury, find a way to train around the injury. If you stop training every time you get injured, you will never train with enough regularity to make meaningful progress.
   
4. After 35, the first goal of any work out–no matter what kind of activity–should be to avoid injury. Healing and recovery take longer the older you get. And injuries set you back more than the gain you would have received in the extra intensity. I train in the 80-90% intensity range. Mostly 80%. I go up to 90 on special occasions with the understanding that there’s increased risk of injury.
   
5. As you age, your training plan, methods, intensity, and goals should change. My training is completely different from how it was in my 20s. I’d probably have to be hospitalized if I tried to replicate it now! But, I’m much more efficient with my training.
   
6. One of the most interesting things I’ve observed is the change in gym culture. Back in the day, it wasn’t welcoming at all to newcomers. Now there’s a lot of positivity and acceptance of new practitioners. But the new gym culture isn’t perfect. Video and camera-loving influencers are becoming a blight in gyms everywhere. Leave your video equipment behind. It’s not a performance. Focus your gaze inward and develop mind-body connection.
   
7. Movement is medicine. The old school mentality was to immobilize an injured part until it had healed, then slowly rebuild the muscle. However, most injuries heal better and faster through (careful and moderate) movement.

Accumulated Wisdom from Working at a Cancer Hospital

1. It’s natural to believe that the worst thing that can happen to someone is for them to die. I’m not sure this is true but even if it were true, there are still good and bad ways to die.
   
2. If you don’t want to die badly you must talk to your loved ones about what kind of death you would like. There are a variety of online form for this. I recommend https://www.fivewishes.org/ but there are also a variety of living wills which allow you to communicate your preferences to your loved ones and medical team. Consider the conditions under which you would or would not want intubation, CPR, dialysis, blood transfusions, artificial nutrition and hydration, and comfort care only.
   
3. Don’t just say what kind of care you want/don’t want but why you want/don’t want it. No legal document can anticipate every possible future end-of-life situation. Knowing the reasons for your preferences gives guidance in unanticipated situations.
   
4. Even if you don’t put your end-of-life care wishes in writing, make sure that the person who will be your legal surrogate decision-maker knows them. It’s well established that over 60% of surrogate decision-makers base end-of-life care decisions on what they would want, not the patient.
   
5. If you don’t let your surrogate decision-makers know your end-of-life care wishes, this can cause permanent rifts in the family and loved one’s you leave behind if there is disagreement among them on these matters. If not for you, do it for the loved one’s you leave behind.

Practical Wisdom Regarding a Career and Higher Education

1. Find a mentor. Find another mentor. And find one more. Mentors are the cheat code to a successful career. But be someone that people will want to mentor. Mid and late career professionals have significant demands on their time. If they’re going to give their time to someone, they want to give it to someone who will truly make something of it. That is, they want someone who shows promise but especially someone with a strong work ethic. Who wants to invest their time in someone who’s only half-assed? Mentorship is a gift, not a right.
   
2. Be a mentor. Help pull up those in earlier stages of their education/career. Be a model and give the support and mentorship you received or wish you’d received. Just having someone in your corner cheering for you can carry people through difficult patches. Be that person for others. Help people avoid the mistakes you made. In short, be a good citizen of your profession/vocation.
   
3. Grad school. Go see your professors before beginning to write your term papers and dissertation chapters. Ask them for feedback on how best to structure your papers/chapters. Don’t go see them without having a topic and some general ideas about what you want to say but you’ll save a ton of time and grief if you get help structuring your ideas.
   
4. Luck Matters…Sort of. Unless you’re already part of a social network that feeds you opportunity, you will need some luck to land your first (real) job. However, if you don’t have the skills and the work ethic, you will not be able to take advantage of this good fortune.
   
5. When you get an opportunity, grab onto like your life depends on it. I can’t speak for other lines of work, but in the academic and academic-adjacent world, early in your career you will receive very few big opportunities. When you get one, treat it as though it’s the last one you’ll ever get.
   
6. Networking is important. You don’t have to like it but you need to do it. Some of my early career opportunities came because, at a conference, I happened to chat with a more senior person in my profession. Also, even if nothing comes of the networking, at some point you’ll run into the same people and you’ll have someone to talk to a the conference social events. So, you made a new friend. Boo-hoo!

Practical Wisdom Regarding Knowledge and Learning

1. Learn how to learn. If you don’t know, find someone who learns better than you and ask them what they do. Knowing how to learn is one of, if not the, most important skill.
   
2. Understand the limits of your own knowledge. If you are not an expert in something, then you don’t have the ability to distinguish between bullshit and truth. In philosophy, this is called the problem of experts. You need to be an expert to know whether someone purporting to be an expert is in fact telling you the truth and/or actually knows what they are talking about. People who over-estimate their knowledge when they are not experts in an area are the perfect mark.
   
   That said, we are not thrust into the world without any signs. Publication record, academic pedigree, body of work, and standing among peers are all indirect (but fallible) signals for expertise. However, these signals can sometimes fail. There’s a closely related problem which is that on most issues there will be degrees of disagreement even among experts.
   
   So, what’s a non-expert to do? The most critical signal is to look for consensus among experts. To the degree that there is a consensus among experts (more specifically, a consensus in the published findings), to that degree a non-expert on that issue should defer to the consensus. There will always be outliers, but given the position of a non-expert, it is staggeringly naive to think that after googling a few articles or listening to some podcasts they are in a position to weigh in on expert-level disagreement.
   
3. It’s a sign of great wisdom to say “I don’t know.” Avoid the urge to have an opinion on everything.
   
4. It’s a sign of great wisdom to change your mind when presented with new and better evidence. “You gotta stand for what you believe in” is horrible advice when you are presented with reasons for why your belief could be mistaken.
   
5. You can learn how to do things good without formal training. It is true, however, formal training and guidance from an already established expert will get you there faster with fewer side quests. It’ll be way less frustrating too. Case in point: I learned how to do plumbing by myself through Youtube and trial and error. I’d have learned much more quickly and my skills would be much better if I’d gone to trade school. I’m not saying never try to figure stuff out on your own, but if it’s for a career or if errors will be very costly, find experts to learn from.

Things I’m Unsure About

1. How to treat chronically shitty and/or stupid people. On the one hand, I see the argument for compassion and even helping people see the light. On the other, it’s fucking exhausting. Some people mistake their shittiness and stupidity for virtue. In fact, some make it part of their identity. There are limits to what we owe others. I really don’t have the time, energy, or emotional resources to debate every shitty and stupid person. On the other hand still (I have 3 hands), if no one tries to engage with such people constructively, they have no hope of changing and their shittiness/stupidity will continue to make life worse for others.
   
2. How to deal with the fact that people are complicated. I know people that have very shitty views on some things but are wonderful and kind in other matters. On the one hand, if we’re only going to socially interact with people who hold the “right” views on all matters, we likely shouldn’t even hang out with ourselves. Most of us probably hold at least one shitty view. It’s also unreasonable to think that people just magically have all the right views on all the right things all at once. Arriving at the Good and the True takes time–if one arrives at all.
   
   On the other, it doesn’t feel right to hang out with a Nazi sympathizer even if they are wonderful in many other respects. For some things, people really should know better. But on the third hand, what if hanging out with the Nazi sympathizer is the way to change their mind? If you abandon them to hanging out with only the likeminded, there is no hope of change.
   
   Currently, I think we ought to maintain hope that at least some people with bad views can change but this is only possible if they have positive interactions with people who don’t hold those views.
   
3. How to feel about massive current and future suffering in the world. Everyday in Houston, dogs are abandoned on the streets and/or killed in shelters. I’m literally living in Singer/Unger’s iterated drowning pond thought experiment– except instead of children, it’s puppies and dogs. On the drive to work, I’ll frequently see a dog on the side of the road that’s been run over. This same problem occurs in every major city in Texas (and probably the South).
   
   But this cruelty is only a speck of dust in a global problem resolvable with spay and neuter laws. And then there’s animal agriculture: About 92 billion land animals are slaughtered each year for food. To say nothing of the decimation of marine life. When I think of this, it weighs me down. I don’t know how to cry for so many deaths.
   
   And then, there’s the decimation of the planet itself. Only 23% of the Earth’s land and 13% of the ocean remains as wilderness. And that number continues to fall every year. Animals and their habitat are destroyed everyday. And of course there’s the human impact too. Some days, I feel sick to my stomach. I want it to stop but I feel powerless in the face of the forces underlying the destruction.
   
   The appropriate response to unnecessary suffering and loss of life is sadness. So what sadness should I feel when an entire ecosystem is wiped out? I don’t know what to feel when it’s at the planetary scale. I’m not emotionally equipped for it. Some people will say something like, “don’t worry about the things you can’t change, and focus on the things you can.” I do this too sometimes but it seems to miss that these problems can only be addressed through collective action.
   
   Buddhists have long advocated for compassion rather than empathy. And a growing literature finds that, with respect to the suffering of others, an empathetic response leads to emotional burnout and hinders action while a compassionate response supports helpful action. Suppose it’s true. I still find it hard not to feel overwhelming sadness when I think about what’s happening to Nature.

I could probably fill a short book but I’ll stop here. Comment below some nuggets of wisdom you’ve accumulated.