So, a long time ago I added a certain character known as The Ferrett to my Livejournal friends, because he wrote interesting and thought-provoking essays about stuff, bringing in his life experiences (of which he's had a hell of a lot) as anecdotes to illustrate his points.
While I would never claim that anyone is the fount of all wisdom, Ferrett's points are pretty damn hard to refute, because in the end his stories almost always boil down to the same basic life lessons.
Be honest to yourself and others.
Expecting the world (and the people in it) to conform to your desires is ludicrous; get over it. If you want things to happen you need to either work out how to make them happen or accept that they won't be happening any time soon
No matter how bad you think your problems are, there's thousands of others who've been in your exact position, and what's more, a lot of them have fixed those problems. Sitting around and whinging about how they're unsolvable isn't going to help. Handing out blame won't help either.
Really, that's pretty much it. I originally had a few others but they were just subsets of the big three up above. I challenge anyone to find a life lesson that can't be handled by the above.
And of course there are some situations that really can't be helped (Cancer? You're just not trying hard enough. You slacker), but that's not what he's on about. He isn't handing out magic advice on how to be successful in life, rather it's advice about how to make the best of what you have.
Also, it's stupidly easy to twist these rules to extremes to find points where they don't apply (white lies/tact comes to mind), but yeh, not the point. Only maths is allowed to have
universal truths :)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
