LIFE STRATEGIES
You Can Become Older But Better, Or Just Older
I just ran across an article by Gian-Carlo Rota called “10 Lessons of an MIT Education”. Most of the lessons had to do with the rigors of being a student there, but one lesson spoke to me in fiery letters:
The world and your career are unpredictable, so you are better off learning subjects of permanent value
This is true everywhere you look, in both career and life.
As I have said before, you die every day in that each moment that passes, you can never reuse to do something different. You can spend your life enjoying countless little squirts of dopamine (e.g., from doomscrolling Facebook or Twitter). Or you can spend at least some of it doing things that have lasting value:
- improving your relationship
- learning how to do the huge chunks of work you’d rather avoid
- stopping your destructive self-criticism
These things take effort, but their lasting value is tremendous because they will deliver important value to you day by day, for the rest of your life.
You are dying every day. The brave thing to do is to become more today than you were yesterday.