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.
The concept of tracking time brings forth images of tracking some wild beast in the woods. Deer, moose, bear, cougars, tigers all leave very distinctive tracks. Time also leaves distinctive tracts. Time leaves physical as well as emotional tracks on all of us. Not to mention the tracks that time leaves on the environment. Emotional tracks are evident in the greater cautiousness and fears that we have as we age. From experience, once burned, we no longer want to get so close to the flame. Indeed, many of us will not even go near the fire again. Divorce, rejection, death, pain all leave emotional scars. For some of us they may never quite heal. Physical tracks show up as lines, creases, joint aches, hair thinning, broken bones and disease. I often joke that physically I am aging more like cheese then a fine wine. I am getting squishier and somewhat moldy around the edges.
Perhaps you see the idea of “tracking time” through a different lens. Maybe you have a need to track your minutes and seconds each day, a twist on tracking your dollars and cents. Perhaps, if you watch your time carefully, you may have more of it. Mark down your time spent each day in an Excel spreadsheet and carefully log your corresponding activities. This last task seems somewhat obsessive to me even though I am often accused of being a Type A personality. I once worked at a job where I was required to check my work in fifteen minute intervals each day and log what I was doing during each interval. After I left this company, I decided I would never again work for anyone where I had to justify myself at this level of detail. It was simply an exercise in obsessive control and domination.
Meaning and purpose are Yin and Yang to each other. Purpose is outside you and is what you do in the world. For me purpose involves doing. Meaning is inside you and what you do for yourself. Meaning involves being rather than doing. Let’s use a running race as an example.
Meaning in my dictionary is about living up to my potential, my values and my beliefs by doing the best I can each day to be consistent with them. No one may ever know if I am being kind, compassionate or patient today. You cannot see the inner virtues that I want to live by. I am the only person at the end of each day who can judge whether or not my life had any meaning today. If I can be the best person that I want to be each day, I will die feeling that my life had meaning. To the rest of the world, I may just be another old teacher, old veteran or old guy who lived an average life and died at an average age. Meaning to me is about being and not doing.
If I answer, I want to be rich, my meaning in life will be defined by how I go about becoming rich and what I do with my money. If I want to be a writer, my meaning will be defined by what I write and how I go about the writing process. If I want to be happy, my meaning in life will be defined by how I go about achieving happiness. No one except me can judge how I define myself. People may say that I am not very rich or that I am not a very good writer, but it is what I believe about myself which will define my meaning in life. Vincent Van Gogh is now widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of all time. His paintings sell for millions of dollars. However, in his lifetime, he sold only one painting. It was to his sister-in-law who felt sorry for him.
“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.” — 
I conclude with the consideration that Meaning and Purpose may not be everyone’s cup of tea. I confess that it was much later in my life and many hurdles had been taken and many obstacles overcome before I started caring about the meaning and purpose of life. Now I look back and shake my head with some sorrow that I did not grasp their import on life when I was in my teens. A have learned that a life without meaning and purpose is not a life, it is just living.
This theory says that happiness is dependent on other things happening in your life. You must have these other things going on or you will not be happy. If you have a good family, or good job or you have meaningful work, you will be happy. Contingency is like a correlation in statistics. The process of having a good family correlates with happiness but having a good family does not make you happy. Some things have a higher correlation with happiness than other things. Some people believe that having less things is more conducive to happiness than owning a bunch of things.
This could also be called the “Cause and Effect” theory of happiness. This theory says that certain things or activities will lead to the outcome of happiness. For instance, becoming an Olympic Gold Medalist may lead an athlete to happiness.
You will always be happy in proportion to how happy others are around us. If I have a great deal of money but my friends have more, I will be unhappy. However, if I have a bigger office than anybody else in the company, I will be happier than they are. The state of being happy will always be relative or in comparison to some other standard that I mark my happiness by.
This theory views happiness as something that has no limits. The sky is the limit. Extraordinary happiness awaits anyone willing to go for it. Every day will bring more and more happiness if you only believe it is possible.
The strangeness of the situation caused me to be somewhat nervous about proceeding further but I thought, I have nothing to fear from an old lady. Coming nearer to the woman, I jokingly asked if she was the same old woman whom I had met years ago and if she remembered me. “Yes”, she said, “but you were much younger then. How did your journey down the Farewell to Life trail go?” How could this be I thought? I don’t believe in magic, miracles, or spirits but suddenly, I began to take her words quite seriously.
Second, what are you going to do about your fears? Fear is an adaptive mechanism. It helps to keep you alive. If you are in the woods and walking down a trail and see a large bear or cougar coming towards you, it is quite healthy to have some degree of fear. But fear alone is not going to save your life. If you are paralyzed with fear you may just be eaten. Fear is an alarm. An alarm sounds to wake us up. The next step is to do something. Doing something is a risky effort with no guarantee of success. Sadly, there are few guaranties in life, but the evidence seems to suggest that doing nothing is worse than doing something. This is where forethought and preparedness come in. One of my favorite quotes is by the Roman philosopher Seneca (died 65 CE) who once said that “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
Dylan Thomas said, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” I don’t know about the raging part of his poem. I prefer thinking about my life as I get older and not raging. But he makes a good point. It is all too easy to give up on life as we age. We can live in memories of what we used to do, or we can find new activities and new levels to pursue old activities at. For instance, I may not have the stamina to play tennis or racquet ball anymore, but I can still play pickleball or go for a short ride on my bicycle. I used to do six-minute miles in road races. My personal best was 38.48 on a 10K. The race I ran for Frederic Family days this year on June 12, 2021, I averaged 10.14 per mile for a 5k. Quite a bit off of my pace from years ago but I still got my t-shirt. I run for t-shirts these days and not trophies.
Once, as a new employee, I was attending my first department meeting with my co-workers and supervisor. I deemed it prudent to keep my mouth shut and observe. At the end of the meeting, my supervisor turned to me and noted, “Well, John, you haven’t said a word. What do you think? Give me your honest opinion.” I took her at her word and gave her my honest uncensored opinion. Big mistake, as I am sure you knew. Turns out my boss only liked “Honest Opinions” when they agreed with her opinions. A good mentor would have warned me of this peril before I put my foot in my mouth.
me by giving me support and stimulation to be creative. I was thinking back over the years that I have been writing. My first paid article was in 1983. It was published in a San Francisco Men’s Journal. My piece was called “The Three Types of Male Intimacy.” I was paid about 25 dollars. It was not much but it felt like a start. I have since published about 40 journal articles, three books and over 600 blogs. It is a good thing that I never quit my day job since I could barely pay my monthly entertainment bill with the proceeds from my writing.
“I do not know what writing awaits me,
Aging Capriciously 