One of my coaching clients recently turned 51 and, upon my encouragement, prepared a list of lessons he’d learned in the “school of hard knocks.” With his permission, I present below a distillation of his wisdom.

1. Measure twice, cut once
2. Learn to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.
3. Life is not about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself.
4. The best vengeance is living life well.
5. Don’t smoke. Don’t abuse alcohol. Don’t do drugs.
6. Love your country and fellowman.
7. Don’t let misfortune steal your dreams.
8. Things could always be worse.
9. Don’t be afraid to fail. Keep in mind that mistakes are stepping stones to triumph.
10. Don’t worry. Everything eventually works out.
11. Don’t be resentful. Don’t take anything personally.
12. You can always get more money, but you can’t get more time.
13. Ask not for an easy life. Ask for the vigor to endure a difficult one and persevere.
14. If you risk nothing, you risk even more.
15. Never underestimate yourself or take your abilities too lightly.
16. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
17. Never say die. Never say never.
18. Don’t worry about what people think, they don’t do it very often.
19. Live within your means.
20. Give people the benefit of doubt.
21. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth
22. Clean up your own mess.
23. Develop a healthy cynicism.
24. If everyone says you’re out of your mind, you just might be onto something.
25. If you have extra, give.
26. With sorrow comes the opportunity for growth.
27. Don’t let time pass. Grab hold of it and make your mark.
28. Don’t overestimate or overstate your ability to influence.
29. There’s nothing wrong with being mediocre in something as long as you become an expert at something else.
30. If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, don’t say it at all.
31. You are not that good, they are not that bad.
32. Hold your head high and look the world straight in the eye.
33. Be as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are of your own.
34. Believe in yourself
35. Have a good time. All of the time.
36. Believe that everybody has the power to change the world.
37. Do something that they don’t expect you to do.
38. Friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on.
39. Don’t be reckless with other people’s emotions.
40. Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults.
41. Speak the truth in love.
42. Learn something new every day.
43. Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. Find it.
44. Never underrate the power of accessibility.
45. Acknowledge those who have helped you.
46. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind.
47. Pardon your enemies, don’t forget their names.
48. Just start. Just take that first step and get started.
49. Don’t expect of others what you don’t demand of yourself
50. Don’t expect anyone else to support you.
51. Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
* George Santayana

For they conquer who believe they can.
* Virgil

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
* George Bernard Shaw

We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side; one which we preach but do not practice and another which we practice but seldom preach.
* Bertrand A. Russell

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
* Henry David Thoreau

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest — at the command — of his head.
* Franklin D. Roosevelt

One must be something, in order to do something.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One must be something, in order to do something.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It all comes down to this: if your subconscious “financial blueprint” is not “set’ for success, nothing you learn, nothing you know, and nothing you do will make much of a difference.
* T. Harv Eker

Think of the poorest person you have ever seen and ask if your next act will be of any use to him.
* Mohandas K. Gandhi

In New York city, a taxi driver and a priest die on the same day and knock on Heaven’s door. Saint Peter receives them and shows the taxi driver and the priest around. The taxi driver’s home for eternity is a lavish new castle equipped with fancy gadgets and butlers. The priest’s new home is a meager hut with neither electricity nor water. The priest complains to St. Peter: “It’s I not him who dedicated all life to faith. I sacrificed much in life, worked hard, and delivered thousands of sermons to the faithful in New York. All I get is a mere hut when this taxi driver gets a castle?” St. Peter responds: “Yes, but when you did you work—when you preached—people slept. When the taxi driver worked—when he drove people around New York,—people prayed hard.”

Your strategies, vision and mission statements, business plans, purposes, determination, ambitions, intents, ideas, resolutions, goals, hard work, sleepless nights—none of these matter if you don’t deliver the results that are relevant to your customers and your stakeholders.

The whole world yearns after freedom, yet each creature is in love with his chains; this is the first paradox and inextricable knot of our nature.
* Sri Aurobindo

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
* Benjamin Franklin

The first essential, of course, is to know what you want.
* Robert Collier

Avoid this dangerous mix of personal (grasping), spiritual and selfless love. Most of the time it ends in frustration.
* Hans Taeger

We are never so ridiculous from the habits we have as from those that we affect to have.
* Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Kindness arises by standing apart from oneself and recognizing all beings as companions on the arduous travel towards highest perfection.
* Hans Taeger

Some men are born to own, and can animate all their possessions. Others cannot: their owning is not graceful; seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their own dividends.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

The thirst after happiness is never extinguished in the heart of a man.
* Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.
* Jane Austen

• Luck, chance, and randomness play a larger role in the happenings of the world than most people acknowledge.
• People tend to justify random outcomes as non-random and rationalize chance outcomes as results of deliberate actions.
• Correlation does not translate to causation.
• People tend to assume patterns in their analysis even when such patterns do not exist.
• Variations in performance and ability can cause disproportionate rewards, difficulties, punishments, or returns.

The best teacher is the one who suggests rather than dogmatizes, and inspires his listener with the wish to teach himself.
* Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.
* Warren Buffett

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
* F. Scott Fitzgerald

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
* Bill Gates

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
* Maya Angelou

People don’t understand the sort of fight it takes to record what you want, to record the way you want to record it.
* Billie Holiday

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
* William James

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
* John Milton

In depth: My three-part course on time management by time logging, time analysis, and time budgeting. Also see my 10-minute “Dash” technique to overcome procrastination.

Ogilvy is one of the founding fathers of modern advertising and spent his life preaching the benefits of research in salesmanship, long informative copy, creative brilliance, and results for clients. Ogilvy famously said, “It is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.”

Ogilvy on Advertising provides excellent sage advice into the art of selling smart. Many of the principles in this book are dated, but the ideology and creative thought processes discussed are timeless.

Ogilvy cites this anonymous poem on why it pays to advertise.

The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To tell you what she’s done—
And so we scorn the codfish
While the humble hen we prize.
It only goes to show you
That it pays to advertise!

Suggested Reading

• Want to be more likeable? Adopt Sam Walton’s “Ten-Foot Rule”
• [Rating Errors] Beware of the halo and horns effects
• The power of genuine interest in others
• What the deaf can teach us about listening

Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.
* Epictetus

A degenerate nobleman, or one that is proud of his birth, is like a turnip: there is nothing good of him but that which is underground.
* Samuel Butler

The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.
* Andre Gide

While it is possible for intelligence to increase the range of benevolent impulse, and thus prompt a human being to consider the needs and rights of other than those to whom he is bound by organic and physical relationship, there are definite limits in the capacity of ordinary mortals which makes it impossible for them to grant to others what they claim for themselves.
* Reinhold Niebuhr

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
* E. F. Schumacher

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.
* Niels Bohr

Man is endowed by nature with organic relations to his fellow men; and natural impulse prompts him to consider the needs of others even when they compete with his own.
* Reinhold Niebuhr

The quality of your life revolves around how you live at this moment. Within a span of a few minutes, you may experience the darkest part of your life or the brightest. In one instant, you may suffer the painful pinpricks of stress; in the next, you may revel in all the fullness and mystery of life.

Upon meditating over these experiences, you will realize that your memories and daydreams are actually illusory. They are not happening now; they are simply mental images flickering in the mind. Most of the strands of your mind’s apprehensions are fleeting and ultimately unimportant.

The first step towards achieving harmony, joy, happiness, and well-being is to recognize that your upheavals are nothing but projections of your mind and to prevent yourself from being stuck in them.

Mindfulness comes from paying attention to what you are doing right now and letting go of regrets, worries, and fears. Far greater joy is in the living process than in the outcome. Be in the moment.

Your past has created the present; create your future by focusing on the present.

Here is a translation of the Bhaddekaratta Sutta, by Thich Nhat Hanh in “Awakening of the Heart: Essential Buddhist Sutras and Commentaries.”

Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.
 
Looking deeply at life as it
is in the very here and now,
the practitioner dwells
in stability and freedom.
 
We must be diligent today.
To wait until tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?

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• The Nature of Worry
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