When I was young...

Lifehack.org posted an article about Things I wish I'd known when I was younger.

Amongst them were these:

Most of it doesn’t matter. So much of what I got excited about, anxious about, or wasted my time and energy on, turned out not to matter. There are only a few things that truly count for a happy life. I wish I had known to concentrate on those and ignore the rest.

If you make your work your life, you’re making your life into hard work. Like most people, I confused myself by looking at people like artists and musicians whose life’s “work” fills their time. That isn’t work. It’s who they are. Unless you have some overwhelming passion that also happens to allow you to earn a living doing it, always remember that work should be a means to an end: living an enjoyable life. Spend as little time on the means as possible consistent with achieving the end. Only idiots live to work.

Everything takes twice as long as you plan for and produces results about half as good as you hoped. There’s no reason to be downhearted about this. Just allow for it and move on.

However hard you try, you can’t avoid being yourself. Who else could you be? You can act and pretend, but the person acting and pretending is still you. And if you won’t accept yourself—and do the best you can with what you have—who then has any obligation to accept you?

The loudest noise in the world is the sound of people whining. Don’t add to it.

Being me, I naturally disagreed with 2 things:

One

I don't feel that the things I've gotten excited about, 'wasted' my time and energy on don't matter. From a big picture perspective, perhaps they don't. But in the lives of the people around me? Maybe. Maybe they won't remember it years from now either. But for that second, that minute, it did. And that's all that matters.

Two

Work is my life. Perhaps, as he puts it, I'm an idiot. But I love my work (and even when it feels crap, all it takes is finding parts of it that I like to do it). And to me, that's enough reason for me to make it my life. It might not always be who I am (I don't exactly want to be known as 'the marketing guy' all my life), but it is what I enjoy doing. We spend 1/3 of our lives working. If we don't love it, then what's the point? I, for one, am not going to spend 1/3 of my life hating what I do! (But then again, that explains why I'm in office at 9pm! :P)

Then again, I'm just being my disagreeable grumpy self :D Or maybe it's because I'm too young :P I don't know, and honestly, it doesn't matter. It'll be great to have a 'textbook' to life which we can follow in order to lead the perfect life, but it's the imperfections that make life seem just perfect.

What say you?