A few days ago, I asked what was the most important advice that you ever received.
I was blown away by the response, to be honest. A lot of you guys really shared some great advice that made me think. So here, I’m sharing all the best advice for life put together by FLD readers!
1. Son, we are too poor to buy cheap things.
2. Material things can be replaced, so don’t value them higher then family, friends or your health.
3. Focus only on the essentials in your life, cut everything else out.
4. Benny shared The Sunscreen Song, which contains a ton of great advice, so I’ll just pick one that really stuck out for me: Do one thing every day that scares you.
5. Follow your gut.
6. You can do it.
7. Good health is one of the most important things. Take care of your body because when it’s not working right it will make you miserable.
8. No one can hurt you without your permission.
9. You are awesome.
10. Too much thinking complicates things….let go what’s inside.
11. There is always a sunrise after every darkness.
12. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
13. What you tolerate, you deserve.
14. Take the first step–no more, no less–then the next will be revealed.
15. Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
16. Change habits one at a time.
17. Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
18. You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit even if you use Hellmann’s.
19. You miss 100% of the shots you never take.
And, I’ll throw in one of my own, to make a nice round number 
20. You can read books, watch videos and read blogs… but nothing will change until you get off your ass and take some action!
How to use this advice (don’t skip this!)
So you read the above list, nodding at many of the pieces of advice.
And right now, there’s about a 90% chance you’d just go on with your life as you did before, not changing anything. That’s the trouble with list posts – they’re easily digestible, and make you feel smart… but they don’t inspire change!
So I challenge you right now to actually take these pieces of advice and take action on them. Like this:
1. Go back over the list, and pick three pieces of advice that really resonated with you. Ones that made you think, ones that make you feel inspired to make changes in your life.
2. Write them down!
3. Figure out how, within the next 24 hours, you can take specific action on at least one of them.
Then think about how you can apply each of your 3 pieces of advice over the coming week. Write down a couple of ideas for each of them.
And now all you need to do is take action!
For example, I chose the one that said “Do at least one thing every day that scares you.” There’s this girl in some of my lectures I wanted to get to know better for a while (occasional 5-minutes conversations between lectures can only get so deep). Anyway, yesterday I kept the advice in mind, decided to do one thing that scared me, and asked her to meet me for lunch today. In fact, I’m off there right after I post this post
Good luck with your own life, and I hope you apply some of the advice from our great readers!
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Quick update about my goals (life coaching!):
Remember how I said taking action is key to making changes in your life? (Hell, I even put a free 7-day e-mail course on the topic).
Well, one of my dreams is becoming a life coach, but I haven’t been doing much about that. So a few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me: “Why don’t you just offer a few free life coaching spots? Just get it out there that you’re a life coach!”
I thought about his question, and realized I didn’t feel 100% confident I could handle helping real life coaching clients. So I got in touch with Tim Brownson, who’s a professional life coach with years of experience, and he gave me tons of great tips and support. Long story short, I’ll be opening up a few free life coaching spots a week from now!
tl;dr Free life coaching offer (from me) coming on Wednesday 18th November, stay tuned!
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I, for one, would be interested in hearing more about your journey to become a life coach, as it develops. (I figure life coaching will be a part of what I end up doing, even if it’s just part of a job that goes by another name.)
@Brian:
You’ll probably hear quite a bit about my life coaching, since I’m mainly going to get my clients through this blog. And the best of luck with your life coaching (or academic advisory, or whatever) journey!
I wouldn’t mind some help in becoming an awesome failure. No joke here. I am the worst failure on the planet, and it’s extremely restricting on both being able to develop abilities, and on my happiness.
Ohhh could you rephrase it so instead of a free life coaching session you get free coaching sessions for life? wooo!
Hello! I think that personal development of one’s ability to be rich and happy is a great thing.
The problem often is that people don’t like to develop in such an artificial way, like following instructions in a book. People want to feel that they are something that cannot be created artificially.
I think that the key to become rich and happy is to find the strenght to throw away everything you have and then find the strength to built your person up again in a controlled way using the advices in books.
That is why even fail is good for you. When you fail, you lose something and you are able to get a new and better version of the “something”.
For example a psychology teacher asked the class, whether they would exit the real world and connect to a machine, that would make them eternally happy. Nobody was very excited about the idea.
The mood is in equlibrium, there would be no happiness without suffering and vice versa.
But sadly the idea of the mood in equilibrium is sort of unhappy. People want to believe that they can be happier and happier.
What do you think?
@Andai:
Now that’s reframing!
If you want, you can think of my blog as “free coaching” advice I give out to everyone. Then it might well be for life
@Anon:
I think you can increase your overall level of happiness, even though you will still have ups and downs.
I think the experiment with people connected to a machine is pretty interesting though. I wouldn’t want that either… there’s just something in my mind telling me that it would pretty much mean my death (I would no longer be anything like who I am), so my self-preservation sense kicks in. (And this same sense probably stops a lot of people from reading any personal development advice, because they’re afraid they will no longer be themselves if they do.)
Also, emotions are funny – they’re kind of sticky. Like… were you ever angry, somebody was telling you to calm down, and you said “NO! I want to be angry!”? (and of course laughed about it later when you calmed down
). I just find it interesting.
Good luck with the lunch date.
@Trish:
Thanks! It went well – we had a good time, but I found out she’s not someone I’m romantically interested in. So we keep in touch as friends now.