2) Don't spend money on a credit card that you can't afford to pay back. The interest and late payments can put you in a hole that can take you years to pay back.
3) Compound interest is your friend. Saving even a relatively small percentage of your income each year, starting at 18, can leave you in much better shape by the time you're ready to retire.
4) If you're working with someone who can be bargained down on a price, it seldom hurts to try. The exceptions may be someone of exceptional talent, someone you're going to have to work with on a regular basis, or someone whose help you're going to need in a timely manner.
5) Try to keep enough cash to pay your bills for at least six months in reserve. It will make your life immeasurably easier if your car breaks down, you have a surprise medical expense, or you get an opportunity to get a fantastic bargain.
6) Dogs are fantastic animals. They deserve to be called man's best friend. But, if you are under the impression that you just need to buy a collar and a bag of dry dog food every month and you're set, you're in for a rude awakening. Dogs tend to be much more expensive and time consuming than you'd think.
7) "Don't have any children or get married until you can support and love yourself first." -- D-Vega
8) "Don't trade your vehicle in on a new one just a couple of years after buying it. Pay it off and ride it until (the wheels fall off), all while putting that car payment in the bank." -- The_Muck_Man
9) College is a lot more work than high school and your job will be a lot more work than college was.
10) Start looking for a new job BEFORE you quit your old job.
11) Don't take any job that only pays commission unless you're either an expert salesman or ready to spend months working without pay to gain the skills you need to become an expert salesman.
12) Ideally, you should choose something you love to do so much that you'd do it for free and find a way to make it into a career.
13) When asking for a salary, always have a figure you want in mind -- and then ask for significantly more than that number. That way, you may get more than what you want and even if you don't, you have a better chance of getting the amount you had in mind than if you had blurted it out right off the bat.
14) There's no shame in taking any honest job.
15) Getting fired or laid off isn't the end of the world. To the contrary, a lot of people, myself included, have moved on to bigger and better things after being laid off or fired.
16) If you're not happy with the job market, the government, or the schools in your area, remember that you can always move to another city or another state. Lots of Americans do just that every year.
17) "I wish that I had known to check the oil in my vehicles and to have changed it regularly. It would have saved a lot of money that I spent on repairs -- directly due to my lack of changing the oil per the mechanic." -- Ann H.
18) Lefty loosey, righty tighty. Turn it to the left to loosen it and to the right to tighten it.
19) Don't ever open a hot radiator cap or you can get seriously burned.
20) Here are 3 keys to keeping a reasonably clean house: don't leave any dishes in the sink overnight; every time you have a full load of clothes, wash 'em, and take out the trash every time the can is full. You do those things, wipe up your messes, and vacuum when the floor gets filthy, and you'll keep things reasonably neat.
21) If you use a computer even semi-regularly, it's worth your time to take a typing class.
22) It's not enough to buy a gun and stick it in a drawer like a lucky talisman. You need to learn to use the gun.
23) When you move, sell, throw away, and give away as much as possible or you'll just end up moving boxes from one closet, where they have been sitting for five years, to another closet, where they'll be sitting for the next five years.
24) Don't ever loan your friends money if you want to keep them as friends. After all, if they were good with money and were likely to pay you back in a timely manner, they probably wouldn't need the loan in the first place. If they really need the money, you want to help them, and you can afford it -- just give it to them.
25) Women should never allow a boyfriend to take naked pictures. If it's on film, you shouldn't be surprised if it goes public in one form or fashion after a break-up.
26) When men have a problem and they tell you about it, they want to know how to fix it. When women have a problem and they tell you about it, they just want you to listen.
27) If you ever get arrested, don't say anything until you talk to a lawyer.
28) If you don't know the agenda of the people you're getting your news from, then you don't have the information you need to know if what they're telling you is true.
29) Government is a necessary evil. It's best to keep its tentacles out of your life and out of our society as much as possible.
30) "When you're 18, you worry about what everybody is thinking of you; when you're 40, you don't give a darn what anybody thinks of you; when you're 60, you realize nobody's been thinking about you at all." --Daniel Amen
31) Trust your instincts. They're usually right.
32) If you think a doctor's wrong, don't hesitate to ask for a second opinion. Your health is vitally important and doctors make mistakes just as often as anyone else.
33) Don't ever say anything that may offend someone who is going to be serving you food. You never know what they may stick in it when you're not looking.
34) If you get into a business deal with someone who goes to unusual lengths to convince you of how honest or Christian they are, watch your wallet and make sure you have an iron clad contract. They "doth protest too much."
35) "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." - Jim Rohn
36) If you want to do something exceptional, don't expect anyone to believe you can do it until you've done it. Unless you're already perceived as exceptional, most people won't believe in you. That's doubly true for the people who know you best and have therefore seen you at your most mediocre, like your parents, family, and friends.
37) If you don't feel like you're being treated fairly by a company, don't hesitate to ask for a manager. Oftentimes, a manager has gotten to where he is in a company because he is good at pleasing customers like you in the first place.
38) "You are not invulnerable and you are not going to live forever. You can (make) mistakes at 18 that you will have to live with for the rest of your life." -- Don_cos
39) Nobody owes you a living.
40) You are not a victim.
41) If you just assume that every conspiracy theory is wrong without even examining it, you will be right 99.99% of the time.
42) "It's likely that whatever challenges you have faced in your life currently could have been avoided but some better decisions upstream." -- Tony Robbins
43) At a minimum, keep a basic "to do" list, a schedule, and a budget.
44) "Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better." -- Pat Riley
45) "If you want your life to have impact, focus it! Stop dabbling. Stop trying to do it all. Do less. Prune away even good activities and do only that which matters most. Never confuse activity with productivity. You can be busy without a purpose, but what's the point?" -- Rick Warren
46) Ironically, successful people tend to fail a lot more than unsuccessful people. They also tend to ask a lot more questions.
47) When you consider Christianity, keep in mind this classic quotation from C.S. Lewis, "If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?"
48) You beat 50% of the people by just showing up. You beat another 40% by working hard. The last 10% is a dogfight in the free enterprise system.
49) There are at least six key areas of your life: health, career, romantic, social, money, and spirituality. If you neglect any one of those areas, it will harm you in the other areas and keep you from being as happy as you can be otherwise.
50) When trying to decide between two closely matched alternatives, always have a bias towards action. In the long run, it'll lead to your having a lot more experience, great stories, and a richer, fuller life.
1) One of the two things I heard over and over when people talked about the original list with older people was some variation of, "I wish I had spent a lot less money on frivolous things and saved a lot more money when I was a teenager."
2) The other recurring theme from older people was, "I didn't know nearly as much at 18 as I thought I did and my parents were right about things a lot more than I thought they were."
3) If you are cutting something, whether it be with scissors, a knife, a box cutter, anything sharp, make sure you are pulling the blade away from your body, not towards it. It may save you a trip to the hospital.
4) If you get pulled over by the police, don't mouth off, keep your hands where the officer can see them, and don't make any sudden movements. It might keep you from getting shot or arrested.
5) "Things every person should have in his car: a car jack and spare tire, jumper cables, flash light, & a first aid kit." -- mightysamurai
6) Write an advance medical directive, a will, and plan for your funeral. Your family will be eternally grateful if something happens. --Anonymous
7) If you're going to be drinking, have a designated driver. Additionally, if you're female and go to a party, always make sure you have at least one person who will look out for you if you're going to get drunk.
8) Here's the best way to get organized: make a list of things you need to do with the toughest things at the top. Do the toughest things first and work your way down.
9) Hopefully, it'll never come to this for you, but it is better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.
10) It's generally a very good idea to avoid writing email, letters, blog posts, or even having conversations with people when you are upset or very emotional. If you do anyway, usually, once you've cooled off, you'll wish you had handled things differently.
11) "You are more like your parents than you would like to admit." --Major-General. The same could be said of the person you're dating. If the family either of you came from is dysfunctional, don't be surprised to see the traits that made it that way crop up in your relationship.
12) "If you want to know what a woman will be like as a wife, it helps to meet her mother. If you want to know how a man will treat you in the years ahead, notice how he treats his mother now. If it isn't with deep respect and courtesy, beware. That's probably the treatment he'll be giving you down the road when you don't wear a halo anymore." --Dexter Yeager
13) It may seem counter-intuitive, but a couple that lives together before marriage is LESS LIKELY to get married and LESS LIKELY to stay married than a couple that doesn't live together before marriage.
14) Your body language, posture, grooming, the way you dress, and the way you carry yourself are much more important than most people realize. That first impression you make on people, based on those non-verbal characteristics, will often define how they see and react to you forever more unless they really get to know you well.
15) Don't put anything on Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, etc. that you would be uncomfortable with the whole world seeing.
16) The stories of people who have been fired after some jerk on the net contacted their job are legion. So, don't give out where you work or your work email on the net.
17) There is a lot to that old saying, "It's not what you know, it's who know." Use that to your advantage when you can. A handshake and a hello at the office, a quick introduction at church, or a short conversation before dinner can get you more jobs, help, and good advice than you ever thought possible.
18) "Never assume your loyalty to a company will be reciprocated" -- Joe
19) Whether your money or time is being spent, never ignoreopportunity costs: "The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action."
20) In a business deal, be very sure of the terms of a partnership and the person you are partnering with because partnerships go sour more often than they hold together, especially if things aren't going well.
21) You can never pick more than two from this list: fast, cheap or good. -- CavalierX
22) When it comes to money, your attitude should be: "If I can't afford it, I don't deserve it."
23) There is no such thing as a free lunch. If it seems free, you may want to ask who's paying for it and why before you take it.
24) When a financial deal looks too good to be true, three good questions to ask are: how much risk is there, how sure are you that the deal is legit, and how is it that such a fantastic deal hasn't already been snapped up by someone richer than you?
25) If you have trouble telling people "no" or are dealing with a persistent salesman, the broken record technique comes in very handy.
"When the other person repeats their request to you, simply repeat the same words of refusal. You may have to do this a number of times, but eventually they will get the message."
26) "I was blown away when I read a December 2004 study in the journal Science reporting that the quality of our sleep has a greater influence on our ability to enjoy our day than household income or marital status. Who knew that snoozing trumps salaries and spouses?" -- Marcy Shimoff
27) The best way to deal with temptation isn't to fight it; it's to avoid it entirely.
28) If you want to know what a person really believes, what they do tells you much more than what they say.
29) "When you have a choice to make and don't make it, that is in itself a choice." -- William James
30) "A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow." -- George Patton
31) "In life, never spend more than 10% of your time on the problem and spend at least 90% of your time on the solution." -- Tony Robbins
32) "Losers find excuses, winners find solutions." -- Anonymous
33) "Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history." --Thomas Sowell
34) "Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself - and be lenient to everybody else." -- Henry Ward Beecher
35) "To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing." -- Elbert Hubbard
36) "...Consider the possibility that man is to God as a dog is to man, and a dog is to man as a flea is to a dog; i.e., the man, the dog, and the flea, who are merely tagging along for the ride, have neither the faintest idea as to why their masters do what they do nor the means to ever understand why.
The question then becomes: Is God indifferent to us, as the dog is to the flea, or does He allow us to suffer for reasons we do not understand? When someone takes his dog to the veterinarian, the dog has no idea why his master allows pain to be inflicted on him. In the same way, perhaps, God doesn't always give us what we want, but He knows what we need." -- Robert Ringer
37) "If you are bored with life, if you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things - you don't have enough goals." -- Lou Holtz
38) "The difference between high achievers and also-rans is almost always the degree of preparation." -- Anonymous
39) "If you won't even remember it five years from now, there's no point in getting upset about it." -- Anonymous
40) When you're dying, you're probably not going to wish that you spent more time watching TV. On the other hand, you probably are going to wish that you had done more with your life and that you had spent more time with the people you loved. Do it now, while you can.
I am sorry, that has interfered... At me a similar situation. Let's discuss.
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