Why twelve you may ask? Probably because I am tired of lists of ten. Or perhaps because there are twelve eggs in a dozen. In any case, here is my list of one dozen thoughts that I believe will help you to live a happier and healthier life. If you find that any of these ideas are not useful, please send your complaints to Dr. John Persico Jr. and I will give you a full refund for any problems you have incurred by adopting these ideas. That will be right after Trump pays off all the debts he now owes. 😊
- The Greeks had it right with the Golden Mean; “All Things in Moderation.” Fanaticism and extremism in any thing will probably make you miserable and unhealthy.
- Question all assumptions. Remember, assume makes an “ass out of you and me.” There is a good reason for not assuming things. Assumptions are the enemy of logic and fact finding.
- You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. This is a very old thought, but it rings true more often than not. The phrase was first printed in 1666 in “Piazza universale di proverbi Italiani”, or, A common place of Italian proverbs and proverbial phrases by Giovanni Torriano.
- Watch your money as though you are going to live forever but live each day as though it were your last. Here the advice is to be frugal when it comes to spending and saving money but somewhat profligate when it comes to living. I do not think this means that you should go bungee jumping off of Mount Everest but living each day fully is in accord with many of the messages we receive from the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Bible, and other wise books. (See my list at the end of this blog)
- When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Not a terribly profound sounding piece of advice, but very difficult to implement. When adversity strikes as it will to all of us, do you fall to pieces, or can you see the silver lining in every cloud? Can you turn adversity into something positive and life affirming? This bit of advice may just help to keep you optimistic and positive about life until you come to your final day.
- This piece of advice comes from my father who probably never read Edgar Allen Poe. I received both good advice from him and bad advice. This is one message that I never forgot and in this day of misinformation, lies and disinformation, it is a very valuable thought. He told me “John, believe nothing of what you hear and half of what you see.” I use this thought to help me check out what people tell me and what I read. I do not assume they are right or wrong. I simply look for corroboration and supporting evidence before I accept anything as true or false. In terms of seeing and believing, cognitive science has proven that “believing is more likely to govern what we see than the opposite thought that “seeing is believing”. Eyewitnesses are seldom reliable and often report wildly different versions of the same event.
- Love is the most important thing in the world. By this I do not mean passion. Othello in Shakespeare’s play said, “I am one who loved not wisely but too well”. People today use the word love to apply to everything from their dog to their cellphones. Loving wisely applies to how we treat others. It has nothing to do with things or events or what we own. Jesus made love for others one of his two most important commandments. Everything great in the universe begins and ends with love. Love is the most precious thing in the world, but it cannot be put in a bottle. Love is spread by compassion, mercy, joy, and happiness but consumed and destroyed by jealousy, envy, hatred, and greed.
- Never say never or at least never say it too often. The older I get, the less absolutes I find in the world. Absolutes create a paradox. Never say never contradicts itself. We must learn to live with paradoxes for though they may sound contradictory, and they are, they can still teach us something. For instance, light has found to be both wave and particle. How can this be? See (25 Fascinating Paradox Examples.) By the way, this statement teaches me to be careful when I say that I will never do something, or something can never happen. Why constrain our lives by having too many “Nevers” in them?
- The more you study something, the more complex it gets. My advisor in graduate school gave me this bit of wisdom. I have also found that the older I get, the less I know. I think this finding relates to the first thought. We start out thinking about something and assuming it is very simple. As we learn more about it, we find that it is much more complicated than we first thought. The older we get the more things that this applies to. Thus, the older I get, the less I know.
- Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. This bit of wisdom comes from an early nineteenth century Scottish author, Sir Walter Scott, a best-selling writer of novels, plays, and poems. The quote is from Scott’s epic poem, “Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field.” A man pursues a complicated plot to attain the love of a rich woman. He is unsuccessful. This bit of advice can help lead us to the value of directness and honesty in our relations with others. Any other path will usually lead us down a dark road that ends in despair.
- Judge not others lest yea be judged yourself. It is not easy to live by this admonition. Jesus himself was guilty of violating his own precept. He judged the Pharisees and called them hypocrites and vipers. In general, we are best lived by not judging others. We will be happier contending with our own lives which will keep us pretty busy. However, there are times when we must judge others. For those times I offer the following three rules.
- Judge frugally. Don’t be hasty to judge anyone
- First look for other options to summary judgements
- Always be open to other possibilities and that your initial judgement may be found wrong
12. Do unto others as THEY would have done unto them. The traditional “Golden” rule says to do as You would have done unto you. This is good advice except that it ignores the fact that THEY are not You. It is much better to use what some have called the “Platinum” rule and do unto others as THEY would want to be done to them and not You. In practice, I try to keep both rules in mind
I hope you find these ideas useful. You should also look at the list of “Wisdom” books that follows and see how many of the 100 you have read. I suspect none of us will have read all of them, but you should have read at least some of them. Another thought I learned in business was not to reinvent the wheel. There is no reason to create your own wisdom when there is so much great distilled wisdom already out there.
These books were identified as the best wisdom books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings
100 Best Wisdom Books of All Time
If you have any suggestions for other wisdom books or wise thoughts that you would like to share, please post them in my comments section.
Despite attending forty 3-day Jesuit retreats and regularly going to church with my spouse, I remain adamantly somewhere between an Atheist and an Agnostic. See my blog 
I can see some positive sides to a church ideology that addressee inner spirituality, but I think it has serious drawbacks. You can focus too much on what I will call the “inner spirituality” of church members. The reasoning behind the emphasis on inner spirituality can be faulty. The theory is that if each member becomes a better Christian, they will be better neighbors towards others. If they feed the hungry and cloth the poor, they will be ridding the world of the evils that Jesus preached against. Unfortunately, these propositions are not evidenced by historical fact. For hundreds of years many Christians supported slavery and sexism by doing little or nothing to condemn or speak out against it. Furthermore, many Christians were major protagonists of racism and sexism. If their ministers spoke out against it, it obviously made little difference. Being a card carrying member of a Christian church never seems to correlate with ending war, sexism, racism, homophobia or even poverty. I think without an equal emphasis on “Outer Spirituality” Christianity is a worthless religion.
There are many definitions of spirituality. What does it mean to be a spiritual person? Some people lean towards accepting a higher being or creator. Some lean towards accepting a more conventional religious perspective. Many on-line definitions list several factors necessary to be a spiritual person. My own definition is much simpler. I think being a spiritual person involves two elements. The first is seeking meaning in one’s life. The second is seeking purpose. Meaning is inner spirituality. Purpose is outer spirituality. Meaning and purpose must go beyond what is simply good for oneself and must embrace what is good for humanity and the universe. Thus, a truly spiritual person is one who finds and balances inner and outer spirituality.
I suppose in one sense, “life is not fair” means that life is indeed following a bell-shaped curve and some of us are on the undesirable end. In other words, some of us are too short, too fat, too unappealing, or any number of other less-desirable traits that we find on the extremes of the bell-shaped curve. Last night I was watching a 3-year-old do stunts on a sized down motorcycle. I could not do these stunts if my life depended on it. This young boy was a natural on the motorcycle. He took to it like a fish to water. We have all seen and perhaps envied some of the more fortunate on our bell-shaped curve who can do things we only dream about doing. For those of us on the wrong end of the bell-shaped curve, life will never seem fair.
I understand why so many people want to believe in heaven and hell. It would be much easier to go on living peacefully if I could really believe that there was someplace better to go to than this earth I now reside on. Too many bad days now seem to intrude on my equanimity. You and I and everyone else that resides on this 3rd rock from the sun are abused and tormented every day with disease, starvation, accidents, environmental devastations, and pandemics. I could handle all of these things but for one thing. It is called “mans’ inhumanity to man.” The stupid cruel things we do to each other over and over again. The wars, murders, and injustices that we inflict on other human beings. And it is not just the average person that inflicts these cruelties, it is the “best” people in the land. In fact, it would seem that the inhumanities done by those with the most money, most intelligence and those we call our leaders are the worst of all the brutalities and savagery that we see in the news each day.
Faith is number five of my seven essential virtues for leading a happy and successful life. Every Friday I start my day with the following prayer:
I decided that I must first understand what Faith really means. To do this, it is helpful to deconstruct how we think about Faith and how we use the word. I thought about how we use both Trust and Faith in common language. For instance we use trust in English as follows:
I think you can readily see that there is a certain degree of overlap between the two concepts. However, Faith generally seems to convey a more sectarian or theological concept of belief whereas Trust is generally used in more secular terms. Thus, we don’t “trust” God but we have Faith in her. Faith seems to be a term that is not contingent upon any kind of physical or logical proof. We might not trust a person with our money without proof that they are “bonded” or trustworthy, but we would not expect such displays of material evidence when it comes to having Faith in God. So what is the relevance to this in our lives? What good is Faith if we can substitute trust for faith and have more security in the long run?
The answer seems to be (IMHO) that sometimes we can trust without evidence but generally we are better off trusting with some element of surety that can mitigate the risk of our trust being unfounded or mistaken. Whereas, there is little or no evidence that can prove your need or desire to have Faith. You must have Faith like a parent has love for a child. It is unconditional. You have Faith simply because you want to believe. You have Faith because you accept something without conditions. You need no proof or evidence to support your Faith. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Should you have Faith without proof? What would a life without Faith be like? Would we be safer or happier with less Faith?
Fortunately, the 3.4 percent of respondents have been more than enough to help me keep my Faith. (Should I really need such sustenance if I have Faith?) Yes, I have Faith that my writing is making a difference to the world but alas, I have no proof for the empiricists, the materialists or the skeptics. I have to ask you as well as myself to believe that I am. It is Faith that keeps me motivated. Without Faith, life would appear to be a futile waste of time. Faith helps us to carry on when everything and everyone is saying to quit. The woman in the life raft, the athlete with a severe injury, the parents with a disabled child, the poor fighting hunger, the righteous fighting injustice are all sustained by the power of Faith.
Faith can believe everything
Samson was the strongest most well-built man on the block. He had muscles chiseled in stone. His muscles had muscles. He stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and did not have an ounce of fat on him. Samson worked out seven days a week, twice each day at the Philistine Gym on Gibeon Street. He worked out before he went to work each morning and after work for two hours each evening.
wanting something more because you can’t have it. Delilah had only one other person she admired, herself. Much like Sampson, she could not pass by a mirror without staring at her reflection and thinking “how beautiful I am.”
Delilah grew more and more desperate in her attempts to get Samson to notice her. Finally, she hit on the idea to simply approach Samson and remark on his wonderful hair. So, one day while he was practicing his dead lifts, she sauntered by and casually remarked on how beautiful his hair was. She proceeded to compliment him on his marvelous muscle definition. She followed up these compliments with the suggestion that they go back to her place after working out and she would cook him a nice microwave dinner and brush his hair. This idea delighted Samson and after working out, they both went to Delilah’s house.
Delilah waited until the night before the World Weightlifting championship. At around midnight, she used the key that Samson hid near his door to let herself into Samson’s apartment. Moving as stealthily as a cat, she entered Samson’s bedroom. Samson was a sound sleeper and he had no inclination of what awaited him. Delilah took the surgical scalpel that she had borrowed from a medical admirer and in one quick slash, she lopped off Samson’s braid. Samson was totally unaware and did not move a muscle. Delilah slipped back out the way she had come and placed Samson’s key back where he hid it.
As the little boy grew up, he became an even more devout believer in God. Everywhere he went, he saw the hand of God. In the clouds, in nature, in the weather, in the oceans, in good times and in bad times he believed that God was present. The little boy thought how hard God must have to work to try to keep life sustained. Each night he would pray to God that when he grew up, he would be able to help ease God’s work somewhat and do his share to help make the world a better place.
Aging Capriciously 