Advise to everyone, including myself: Disrespectful or hurtful language never serves you. It gains you no points, no advantage. It heals no part of your soul nor psyche. Because words are free, they are easy to choose poorly. It’s free to sling insults or to mock. That’s exactly why it’s a test of character not to do it. Pass that test as often as you can.

If you can’t decide what to collect, collect resources. You can always exchange them later!

What people do and what people say they (would) do varies so wildly it’s like people are just barking at each other all the time. It honestly boggles my mind that people will use other people’s words as a measure of who they are as a person or to try to predict that person’s behavior, instead of simple observation of what they do.

If a person is cheering for the Eagles but buys and wears Steelers gear, then they’re a Steelers fan, not an Eagles fan.

It’s easy to show you care about something (or someone) when things are good. But when there’s strife, you learn a lot about people’s true priorities. People who quickly turn away from a thing in difficult times don’t really internalize a devotion to that thing.

Imagine a parent who showers their child with love when the child is well-mannered, but as soon as the child is sullen or cranky the parent ignores them. How would we judge such a parent?

The test of love is what you do when it’s hard to love.

A general piece of life advice: if a particular fact, event, or other happening will benefit you if remembered and benefit others if forgotten, then not only should you remember it, you should keep very accurate records.

No one else will be as careful of a steward with your receipts as you, so don’t trust vital things to the faulty memories of others.

Build a life where you do favors for others, often. Big ones and small ones. Why? Not only is it good for your soul, but the secondary effect is that if you’re building a life that makes it possible for you to do this, that life is inherently successful. If you want to maximize your favor-granting potential, that means your own health is good, it means you have financial security, and it means you have a wide circle to do favors for. What a joyous life!

One of the surest ways to cloud your thinking about a question is to map the possible answers onto tribal affiliations. In other words, if a question has an “us” answer and a “them” answer, then it doesn’t matter which one is right – you’ll pick your tribe’s answer nine times out of ten.

Sometimes the best way to teach is simply to put a curious person in the path of knowledge and then back up. The opportunity cost of everything you want to teach is everything else they want to learn in that moment; never forget it.

An incredibly underrated but vastly powerful trait is the willingness to start reasoning toward an answer that you don’t already know, instead of just saying “I don’t know” as if that was the final word on the subject. You can learn via others teaching you, and you can learn by experience – but you can also learn by pure reason, and if you’re willing to at least give it a try, marvelous doors start to open up.

My son was talking about geometry, and so I figured I’d ask him a weird one and asked if he knew how many sides a septagon had. Here is his direct quote answer:

“I don’t, but it’s not 5, 6, or 8, because that’s a pentagon, a hexagon, and a[n] octagon. And ‘sept’ sounds like ‘seven,’ which is how I remember that ‘siete’ means seven. So I’m gonna guess seven.”

What a powerful brain! Such a mind can overcome any obstacle, simply because it believes that a path to the other side must exist. Being unwilling to take “I don’t know” as a satisfactory state of affairs, you can always begin to reason. You won’t be able to get all the way to every solution that way, but you’ll get much farther than you would otherwise, and you’ll almost always at least get to a point where you have an idea for a better question or more specific source of information to seek out.

Learn from Buddy!