RealLife Lessons
Wisdom from people who actually lived it. Nothing here was chosen because it was popular — there is no such thing here.
Parenting
“I learned my children never cared how much money I made. They cared that I came home.”
I worked every hour I could get for the first ten years of my children's lives. I told myself I was doing it for them, and I believed it. What I did not understand is that a child…
Success
“I spent twenty years chasing success. I found happiness the day I slowed down.”
I spent twenty years chasing something I could not name. A bigger contract, a better title, the year that would finally feel like enough. I got most of it. None of it did what I e…
Marriage
“Never let pride keep you from saying you are sorry.”
We nearly ended it over a kitchen. Not the kitchen — the being right about the kitchen. I had a whole case prepared. I could have won it. I watched myself getting ready to win it…
Business
“You cannot learn anything while you are performing competence.”
My first business failed in fourteen months and I was certain everyone was watching. Nobody was watching. That was the first lesson. The second took longer: the business did not f…
Grief
“Grief is not a problem to be solved. It is love, still looking for somewhere to go.”
When my father was dying, I kept waiting for the profound conversation. I had questions ready. It never came — he was tired, and mostly we watched the racing. I felt cheated for a…
Craftsmanship
“Do the work properly when nobody would ever know the difference.”
Thirty-one years turning wrenches. Young lads come in wanting to know the trick. There is no trick. There is: turn up, tell the truth about the price before you start, and never h…
Leadership
“Leadership is a deposit you make long before the day you need to withdraw it.”
I commanded people younger than my own children. The thing nobody prepares you for is that authority is mostly borrowed — it comes from whether the people beside you believe you w…
Teaching
“Children carry your throwaway lines for decades.”
I taught eleven-year-olds for thirty-five years. The children who worried me were never the loud ones. It was the ones who had already decided, at eleven, what they were not good…
Finance
“Keep enough set aside that a bad month is an inconvenience and not an emergency.”
Nobody tells you that money stops being about money somewhere around the point you have enough. After that it is entirely about sleep. I have been broke and I have been comfortabl…
Retirement
“Never retire from being expected somewhere.”
I retired on the Friday and by the Wednesday I was frightened. Forty years of being needed by nine in the morning, and then nothing needed me at all. It took most of a year to wor…
Cooking
“Somebody will want your handwriting more than your precision.”
My grandmother's bread recipe is written on the back of an electricity bill from 1974. I have made it perhaps four hundred times. It is not a good recipe — the quantities are wron…
Faith
“Doubt is not the opposite of faith. Indifference is.”
I was certain, at twenty-five, about a great many things I have since had to put down. Faith turned out not to be certainty at all — the certain years were the shallow ones. What…
Your turn
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