“… in times of rapid change, it is paradoxically more useful to immerse yourself in the basics and the classics than to try to keep up with the latest developments and hottest trends. You can be almost 100% sure that the hot theories making waves in academia today will be forgotten or superseded in twenty years — but fifty years from now people will still be reading and thinking about the classic texts that have shaped our world. Use your college years to ground yourself in the basic great books and key ideas and values that will last.

For the same reason, don’t worry too much about getting specific skills at this stage. You are going to keep learning new skills all your life and you are going to find many of your skills obsolete as time goes on (when I was a kid I was very good at operating something called a mimeograph machine). What you want to do now is to develop your ability to learn.

It’s a lot of work, but don’t panic; you are not going to get this all done in four years. Becoming educated is a lifelong project; you can’t turn your mind off and stop reading books when you finish college and expect to get anywhere.”

Good advice for college students (or students of all ages) on the coming Education Bubble.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.

I’m very blessed to be able to have silliness and fun in my life and job on a near constant basis (I wish I could share a story, but time and privacy issues are both encouraging me to keep quiet). Suffice to say that we laugh a lot around here, and try to keep an open mind toward change. I couldn’t be happier about that.

The 1980 retro coffee shop.

Who are the people who tend to run for political office? Political office is hard to get and takes a lot of effort, so only ambitious people seek it. That wouldn’t be so bad if we got smart/ambitious — and the useful kind of smart, not the pointless write-a-doctoral-thesis-on-transgender-Native-American-pottery “smart.”

But what do ambitious, capable people do in this country? They start their own businesses and lead successful lives comfortably away from the fickleness of the ballot box. So that just leaves the people who are ambitious but useless and just love the thought of being able to meddle in all the useful things everyone else is doing. And then the whole election process, where the politicians constantly lie and change their positions on issues to keep their jobs, tends to weed out the people who aren’t also sociopaths. So the system we have has basically set us up to be governed by ambitious, useless sociopaths who love to meddle in everything actual contributors to society are doing. So lawyers, for the most part…

It’s pretty simple: We [should] treat all legislators like lying crooks, because they self-identified as such by running for office; normal people don’t desire to spend other people’s money. Right now, being a representative or a senator is a high-paying, prestigious job that any idiot could do (and some exceptional idiots have done it for years), but if there were a few more drawbacks to being a legislator, maybe the worst of them would stay away. And if they don’t, at least maybe they’ll stay in line more if we let them know we consider them to be the worst of the worst and are keeping an eye on them. Then perhaps they’ll listen to those of us who really are supposed to be in charge in this country, the ones who actually work for a living.

Pretty funny (and sadly true). link. (apologies to my friends in law school… don’t sue me!