"Never let perfect get in the way of good enough."

If you wait on the "perfect" time to do something, or the "perfect" opportunity, you may find it never comes. Make the most of what's in front of you.

"I've always enjoyed an advantage over people who don't read the instructions." -My Dad.

Folks, life doesn't always come with instructions, but when it does... read them.

If not me, then who? If not now, then when?

...as an adult, you realize that much of the time, no one is going to come save you.

Buy a plunger before you need a plunger

And

Win small, lose small

This last one I heard applied to backing up a trailer, but it works in many corners of life.

Got this one from a fortune cookie. What can I say, if it's good it's good.

"Friends are those who, when you've made a fool of yourself, don't think you've done a permanent job of it."

"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly"

When you have a task, no matter what it is, it doesn't actually matter too much if you do a good job or a bad job. What's important is that you do a job. Don't give up on something because it isn't perfect or because you don't have all the answers; just do it anyways. It doesn't matter if it's shitty or if it's incomplete, it's still infinitely better than doing nothing at all.

We think we are approaching death gradually, and will die one day. That's not true. We are dying every single day, every single minute. The time in our life that has already passed, now belongs to death.... It's not that our life is short, it's just that we waste a lot of it.... We may leave this life this very moment, let that decide how we will go about with our stuff today.

• Seneca / Marcus Aurelius

people don’t remember what you say or do nearly as much as they remember the way that you make them feel.

From my ex-father-in-law

Trust not what the snake will do, but what it can do.

This comes to mind while driving

A bad driver never misses their turn

Finally, my daily motivator (on my lock screen)

This too shall pass

Never push a glacier

If someone is unfairly criticizing someone or a group of people it is only because they feel inadequate in some way.

Haven't seen it yet.

You can make no mistakes and still lose. That is not failure, that is life. -Picard

This.

It doesn't TAKE all kinds, we just HAVE all kinds.

Nature bats last.

The earth isn't dying, it is being killed, and those killing it have names and addresses.

Never agree to do something next week you wouldn't do now

"Nothing good lasts, nothing bad lasts. The only constant is change."

Don't let school get in the way of your education

Only break one law at a time.

For example; If you have an AI executive tied up in the trunk of your car, make sure the tail lights all work.

"The graveyard is filled with people who had the right of way"

A few from the file I keep:

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. - Jan van de Snepscheut

I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned. - Richard Feynman

Give a man a mask and he'll show you his true face. - Oscar Wilde (paraphrased)

You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. - C.S. Lewis

Magic is science you can’t explain. Science is magic you can. - My Daughter

You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago. - Alan Watts

What you do to achieve your goals must never become more important than the goals themselves. - Anonymous

never carry what you can roll, never roll what you can leave.

back saving advice from an old stagehand.

Never run when you can walk, never walk when you can stand, never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down. If you lie down, sleep.

The days are long but the years are short.

After everything is said and done, there’s a lot more said than done.

Most people will talk about doing something rather than doing it.

I have several that I live my life by. Being prompted has caused me to forget all of them

"You do not treat a man like a gentleman because he is. You treat a man like a gentleman because you are."

The one that stuck with me the most was one I heard a long time ago:

You will know the pain of discipline, or the pain of regret.

Unfortunately, I never became disciplined, but now that I'm old and full of regrets at least I know it was right.

It is only when a mosquito lands on your testicles that you realize there is a way to solve problems without using violence.

This will be an odd one. I get a lot of anxiety. But as twisted as it is, one of my mentors said to me:

Relax, no one is shooting at you.

I cannot for the life of me remember where/who I heard it from, but I do remember hearing soemone say "Respect is earned, not given" and I agree so much with it.

I'm the type of person who will give you a baseline amount of respect, but it's very much so on a slippery scale. One wrong or right move can change completely how I view you and evaluate our relationship.

I can tell you one that is super applicable to the current era:

Garbage in, garbage out.

It's a 1980s programmer's adage in response to the belief by business owners that computers could solve their problems without data, or with limited data, or with inaccurate data.

Cut to the era of LLMs in which we're asking glorified autocomplete to answer deep, philosophical or religious questions, or complicated political questions or complex logical dilemmas, when they were trained on Reddit and 4Chan.

There's a 1970s corollary;

The computer is always right.

This is from the tendency of clerks and bureaucrats to, when confronted with conflicts between reality and the data fields in a computer database, favor what the magic box says.

Again, we're seeing magical box thinking in the present day.

*If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging"

If you find yourself in a bad place, don't make it worse.

Some people only speak one language.

In short: Don't worry about it.

In long: If you have a problem, you can either do something about it or you can't. If you can do something about it, do that thing instead of worrying. If you can't, worrying just gives you an additional problem.

"I don't know" is a valid scientific statement and (hopefully) the beginning of wisdom

"The enemy of good is perfect."

Endlessly chasing perfect can destroy something that was already good.