1. Realize that reading political/world news probably won't have any direct impact on your life. Don't watch TV news. Instead, spend time diving very deep into a particular subject areas by reading books about these areas and trying to answer your own specific questions.
2. Find something useful to do with your commute (e.g audio books) or eliminate it. This could be a large part of your life and it adds up.
3. Marry the right person. Don't marry too young.
4. Fix your chronic health problems.
5. Understand and study nutrition.
6. Build relationships. This takes time.
7. Make things happen. Create things that weren't there before that other people participate in. Practice planning things in advance and executing on them.
8. Learn what you can from your parents before they go senile.
9. Have some sort of passion besides your job and passive entertainment. You will become a far more interesting person and attract interesting people.
10. Do not undercharge for your labor. Live well below your means. Don't work for or with jerks.
11. If something isn't working in your life, change something, measure and retry. Iterate. This is basically applying lean principals to everything. Don't get stuck with "good enough" and then it's a year later.
> 1. Realize that reading political/world news probably won't have any direct impact on your life. Don't watch TV news. Instead, spend time diving very deep into a particular subject areas by reading books about these areas and trying to answer your own specific questions.
While following this advice might make an individual happier, if most people followed it, we'd gradually become slaves to the ruling class which would happily exploit us without us noticing or willing to do anything about it.
I think most of the "news" is slanted to get people to do or think things. It's only in lesser visited corners of knowledge wrapped up in books or specialized study that the persuasion background noise dies down and real understanding is easier to piece together.
I avoid a lot of mass media (e.g TV) because if I absorb and process the same information everyone else does I'll think thoughts that are similar to everyone else. I guess that's good and bad. It's helpful to at least be aware of what everyone else is thinking.
The truth is closer to that the "ruling class" is more like "slaves" to us than the other way 'round. We can ( and do ) turn on them in seconds, and they are not heard from again.
Read Marshall MacLuhan and Vance Packard. Yes, they are dated and the words are musty. The reason not to watch a lot of news has more to do with the effects of that sort of media on your nervous system than what anybody intends by it. You sort of can't just unplug, but know the game and realize you're in it. Have a diet of long-form works to balance out the blurb feeds.
2. Find something useful to do with your commute (e.g audio books) or eliminate it. This could be a large part of your life and it adds up.
3. Marry the right person. Don't marry too young.
4. Fix your chronic health problems.
5. Understand and study nutrition.
6. Build relationships. This takes time.
7. Make things happen. Create things that weren't there before that other people participate in. Practice planning things in advance and executing on them.
8. Learn what you can from your parents before they go senile.
9. Have some sort of passion besides your job and passive entertainment. You will become a far more interesting person and attract interesting people.
10. Do not undercharge for your labor. Live well below your means. Don't work for or with jerks.
11. If something isn't working in your life, change something, measure and retry. Iterate. This is basically applying lean principals to everything. Don't get stuck with "good enough" and then it's a year later.