Don’t break more than one law at a time

Don’t forget earplugs when visiting a concert. Prevent tinnitus, the ringing in your ears for indefinitely.

Yes. There is an entire field of risk management devoted to this topic. It’s complex.

There are some strategies that you can use in a wide variety of situations: commit as late as possible, figure out how to undo something before you do it, imagine the worst consequences to an action and then decide if you can accept that worst outcome.

How to do those things? It depends on the situation. What else can you do? It depends on the situation.

Start saving money while you’re young if you’re in a position to do so.

I can’t believe the number of colleagues I’ve had in the past that were making good money without having responsibilities (living at their parents’) and spending most of it at the bar or to go party in Cuba only to hear them complain years later that they didn’t have enough money saved to make a 10k downpayment…

Don’t waste energy trying to live life with zero irreversible or undesirable consequences.

Plan to avoid them, sure. Make good choices, sure. Accept that a lot of your learning, growing and opportunities will emerge from irreversible and undesirable outcomes

Step 1. Analize what’s the possible consequence / event that you find undesirable

Step 2. Determine whether there’s something you can do to prevent it: if there is, go to step 3, if there’s not go to step 4

Step 3. Do it, do that thing that you believe can prevent it. And after you’ve done it, go back to step 2 and reevaluate if there’s something else.

Step 4. Since there’s nothing else you can do to prevent it, accept the fact that this consequence might happen and adapt to it… you already did all you could do given the circumstances and your current state/ability, you can’t do anything about it anymore, so why worry? just accept it. Try and make it less “undesirable”.

Step 5. Wait. Entertain yourself some other way… you did your part.

Step 6. Either the event doesn’t happen, or it happens but you already prepared to accept the consequences.

Step 7. Analyze what (not) happened and how it happened (or didn’t). Try to understand it better so in the future you can better predict / adapt under similar circumstances, and go back to step 1.

3-2-1

3 copies of data

2 different storage medium

1 set of data at an off-site location

Sure: never go anywhere or do anything of substance or interact with anyone in any meaningful way. Avoid the potential for consequences.

Exist, but don’t live.

floss

Avoid relying on a single failure point, especially when it’s a person or group of people, when the consequences are anything of substantial value or importance to you.

Instead, when such a failure point exists (which is more or less inevitable in life), before committing, have an alternative exit plan prepared and thought out, including the trigger point for when it’s time to bail, and preferably have the exit plan already begun in some way so that starting it up when necessary isn’t too hard.

Getting trapped in a situation where people have power over you or your situation, but are letting you down, and you have no clear recourse, is a mind fuck and gets plenty of people. The exit plan is there to protect you and provide perspective as much as giving you “an out”.

A corollary of this is that if you can’t setup a satisfactory alternative/exit plan before you commit, then you shouldn’t commit, unless you’re absolutely certain that you can live with the worst case scenario. Which is dangerous though, because it’s easy to convince yourself that things will be fine and that the worst case scenario is actually better than it will turn out to be … better to stay agile and have the exit plan.

If you feel in your gut that she’s not the one, you have to trust that feeling. Going into a marriage you know is going to leave a part of your soul behind, reasoning that you’ll just give it a chance for a few years, that’s lost time. It never comes back.

You have to trust your gut. If you have a bad gut feeling but don’t want to tell others because of goals your mind is afraid of sacrificing, you need to trust your gut over your mind.

If that’s where you are, just know that there is a better life than you can imagine waiting for you, if you truly decide to feed your true self. Everything you think about losing is nothing compared to the continual warm glow of knowing you’ve got your own back.

Don’t give that up for someone else. Don’t be with someone who makes you betray yourself.

Started a daily stretching routine recently. I read one of those ‘things you wish your younger self did’ posts and stretching came up a lot so I thought I’d give it a go. I guess there’s some pretty irreversible consequences that come from aging so doing what you can to limit that seems like a good idea.