A Bit More Detail
The information on this page will give you just a bit more traction. But we encourage you to discuss them with a person you trust and, ideally, has more life experience than you so that you have a chance of getting an elevated perspective that you may not yet have the life experience to see properly.
Knowledge Priorities
In the ideal world we would all be raised by perfect parents, in perfect communities in circumstances that feel safe and fair. Well--- that didn't happen, right!?
It is impossible to live your best possible life without adequate understanding of and skill in the four categories below. Parents should consider being deliberate about assuring their children get adequate guidance in each of the four categories. Struggling adults should review them and see if their intuitions suggest they need to find ways to plug gaps in knowledge or skills in one or more of the categories.
A perfect childhood occurs for few people. For one thing, even an objectively perfect parent can't be a perfect parent. No parent can really know enough details about how their children emotionally and intellectually interpret their experiences. And thus no parent can help a child as much as they may want to.
That's not all bad because never experiencing stress and learning to resolve it would leave any child completely incapable of developing the emotional resilience that is probably the single most important trait to learn for any child. This is true whether you are brilliant or not, physically robust or not, socially adept or not.
On the homepage are four key knowledge and skill categories that people might consider a useful scaffolding. They are presented in the order that I consider most useful for parents with young children. But because nearly none of us receive anything near ideal parenting, they are also useful for adults that are recognizing they need to repair emotional damage and/or educational short-comings left over from their childhood years.
Seek to grow your wisdoms
Being wise is the confluence of knowing useful information, understanding the choices they make available to you, recognizing the specific choice that is most constructive to your life goals, and mastering your own behaviors enough to successfully implement that best available choice.
Know the truth about wisdoms.
They can only deliver their value to you if:
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Find them.
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Understand them properly.
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Agree with them.
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Deliberately exert sufficient effort to integrate them into your behaviors when appropriate.
Be your own best friend.
This is a commitment you should make and re-affirm whenever necessary.
Your body and the thoughts in your head are the only guarantees you have 24/7 until the moment you die. No amount of wealth, health, celebrity or accomplishment will provide enduring satisfaction if you can't love yourself unconditional exactly as you are.
Know the truth about suffering.
Pain is a real, physical phenomenon, but suffering and feelings of dissatisfaction (in any of its many forms) are emotional conditions. As such, we must choose to continue to suffer after an unpleasant event in your life.
It is impossible to substantially achieve wisdom #3 without also working towards this wisdom.
Life is not fair.
If you do not already fully accept this regrettable truth you will be stuck in some form of fantasy in your reactions to life and in your responses to life events. In short, you will not be successful at achieving wisdom #4 if you don't also accept this wisdom.
Strive to understand life as it truly IS and make your plans and choices accordingly.
Not suffering is not enough.
Learning the skills to not suffer your own thoughts and emotions (wisdom #4) is a fantastic accomplishment in life that many people around the world already do substantially achieve. However, it is not a sufficient goal. It would be silly to simply learn to accept anything that happens to you
Most of us wish to actually engage with life in a way that will maximize our ability to flourish as much as our unique circumstances will allow it. That means making choices about what unpleasant experiences and circumstances may be within our power to eliminate or improve... and then putting forth the appropriate effort to actually improve those things that we can.
Try your best.
By definition it is not possible for any of us to ever do more than our best. It is necessary to understand that "trying your best" is always a conditional statement. It depends on your available time, your current situational understanding, your available resources to help and a whole host of other parameters. Imperfect, or even terrible results, begin to lose their ability to emotionally devastate when you know, and understand, this wisdom: When you know that you really do always try your best.
BUT the only way to KNOW that you've tried your best involves applying a "reasonable level" of situational awareness. If you are aware that you are getting ready to choose a non-trivial course-of-action--- and you believe that you are putting sufficient thought and available resources towards that course-of-action, then you have tried your best. The future-you will never have any rational reason to regret any of your moment-by-moment choices and behaviors at any point in your lifetime.
You can--- you must re-evaluate everything about your life after your childhood.
The childhood development years of our lives is handed to us by fate. We have no control over how well our parents or guardians raised us. We have no control over the safe or unsafe, under-pleasant or over-pleasant the circumstances were. For better or for worse the life views we develop in our childhood is hostage to all of this. But be clear, they are only life views. Do not assume they are even slightly correct even if you have fared well under them.
Find ways to see everything fresh once you are financially independent. This is the point when you not only can--- but you actually should use the wisdoms in this list (and others) to repaint any part of your life at any point you no longer feel it is wise to merely accept the current colors and textures. From this point on, stop blaming what may have been handed to you and start making the changes that are necessary to align with the life plans that you and you alone are now responsible for.
Know your life goals and priorities. Keep an up-to-date life plan.
It is not possible to actually succeed at trying your best (wisdom #7) unless you have a criteria against which to measure better and worse choices.
"You can sail a ship with no rudder; but no one can know where it's going to end up".
Be sure you are sailing through your lifetime with the best possible map and compass. Your life plan, however vague or detailed, is the map and wisdom #14 is about reading your compass often enough and taking the necessary actions to course correct if possible. Wisdom #7 addresses the impossibility of anybody ever sailing a perfect straight-line between the milestones (ports) on their map.
Know the insight of diversity.
Diversity is not just race, sexual orientation and body morphology. Understanding diversity, with depth, is understanding in a deep way that everyone else in life is not a clone of you. Everyone has their own life history, intellectual inclinations, fears and priorities. Everybody else, NOT just you, is actually trying their best too (wisdom #7); even if they are behaving in a ways that feel obnoxious to you.
As much as it makes us "feel smart" when we try to judge others, the fact is that nobody else is actually "an idiot" for their viewpoints, behaviors or actions. Hating or even just judging others makes it impossible to substantially achieve wisdom #4 because you are watering negative emotions within yourself that are seldom actually necessary in life.
Understand the difference between wants and needs.
If you are prone to define too many things in life as "needs" you are truly dooming yourself to dissatisfaction (failing at wisdom #4 and thus also wisdom #3). Use a sharp mental knife to separate those lists... and then perhaps further prioritize the "wants" list with equal mercilessness into lessor and greater wants.
This wisdom alone will reap huge emotional rewards. Combined with the others, it's difficult to not reach a much more pleasant place in your emotional life.
Understand the difference between information, knowledge and belief.
Understand the enormous difference between an actual, bona fide fact--and a belief. Understanding that we all KNOW very little is necessary to keep growing. It also creates more constructive family and social interactions as we "drop the pomp."
Even the brightest and most-educated among us are all mostly ignorant; That is inevitable as humans. Understanding that reality is an important part of keeping open the doors of personal growth rather than living a life of rigid opinions that separate you from everyone that is not in the same bubble that you are. Ergo, you have failed at achieving the benefits of understanding wisdom #10 if you do not fully comprehend and behave according to this wisdom.
Make a personal commitment to deliberate and sustained effort towards self-evolution.
You can read all of the great texts on the planet and watch all of the best YouTube videos, but doing that will just eat time on your life's hourglass unless you actually spend enough time to really understand the wisdoms--- and you successfully integrate the lessons into your default life behaviors.
None of the wisdoms in this powerful list of wisdoms can be "achieved" in any way that is guaranteed to be permanent in your life. At best you can "achieve" them for your life as it has been. Big life changes will require recommitment and new effort for the new circumstances.
Align your life with your goals and priorities.
The integration part of wisdoms (wisdom #2) is far easier when you haven't constructed a life and lifestyle around yourself that is resisting your own values and priorities at every moment. We all have restrictions on what we feel we have the power to actually change. But the point is that you need to make it an on-going process to observe where there are frictions in your life behavior, relationships and physical circumstances and do what you can to eliminate them.
Live in Earth-time whenever possible or necessary.
Newtonian Earth-time is gentle, constant and inevitable. It's the smooth flow of the daily sunrise and sunset... and the smooth cycle of the seasons wherever you live. The industrial paradigm for consuming Earth-time, on the other hand, is physically and emotionally destructive and is not inevitable.
There are many benefits of living in a highly industrial society, but that society seduces us into believing (wisdom #12) that we MUST accomplish more and more and do it all as quickly as possible. Some people are better suited to this pressure than others. But in the end, none of us are machines. Our bodies and emotions evolved to a usually gentle flow of time.
We must monitor and make adjustments to where we try to stay on this spectrum between Earth-time and industrial-time. Learning to reconnect to time as nature intended is not strictly available to everyone. Most of us really are still at places in our lives where we are inextricably stuck in a hurry. That said, simply being aware of the industrial pressure to "always be in a hurry" can provide the impetus you need in order to reduce that pressure as much as possible whenever you sense that your mind and/or body need to recover for a while.
On a path towards unconditional Love: The nearly inevitable result of living wisely.
If you have properly understood the first fifteen wisdoms--- and your life informs you to agree with them, then you are surely on the path that leads towards living in unconditional love for all people.
Wisdom #10 should teach us to understand that even if everyone on the planet lived perfectly by these 16 wisdoms, billions of individual life experiences will still assure serious and even dangerous conflicts between people will never go away. There will always be treacherous people and people with motivations that are dead-wrong and ill-conceived from you unique perspective.
Living in unconditional love does not suggest one should suspend anything at all about how you currently see the realities of the world and other people. It does not imply you must be irrationally friendly towards people that seem to you to be ill-motivated. But it does mean that your choices and behaviors are maximizing your own personal health and the health and behaviors of anyone you interact with to the extent that they are capable of responding to your good example.