40 For 40 (Part 2)

Welcome to the second half of 40 For 40, forty things I’ve learned in my forty years on this planet. Yesterday’s 20 was fun. I’ll try to be more serious this time around.

1. Surround your self with good people, and marry the best person.
2. When you’ve lived long enough to understand the kind of help that would’ve improved your life, extend that help to others.
3. There’s nothing wrong with Oklahoma that moving to California can’t fix.
4. Find someone who knows things you wish you knew and learn from them.
5. Money in politics isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of voters in politics that’s the problem.
6. Early adopters pay extra to test new products.
7. Learning to wait in line is one of the greatest skills I’ve learned, and it has proven transferable to many other situations.
8. Racists, sexists, xenophobes, and homophobes are much more concerned about being called racists, sexists, xenophobes, and homophobes than being racists, sexists, xenophobes, or homophobes.
9. You shouldn’t wait until you’re in your thirties to see the world.
10. “‘You’ is a very fluid concept right now.” — Hitch, 2005. These are words to live by.
11. “Know yourself; know your worth” — Drake, 2013. More words to live by.
12. The first year in Los Angeles will be the worse, but once you make it through that, you’ll be ok.
13. Payday loans are an apt name because you quickly find that you’re giving your paydays back to the loan company.
14. Winter is for suckers.
15. Eating well and exercising really does feel as good as people say it does.
16. Getting your rent down to a third of your past-tax monthly income is imperative.
17. There’s no value in saying mean things about people online. The greatest cost is the time wasted thinking up the awful thing to say.
18. It’s ok that half of marriages end in divorce. The other half end in death, which takes forever to get over.
19. There is nothing sadder than the creeping realization that you haven’t actually learned forty things in your life.
20. You don’t become your parents as you get older, but you do become aware of how much influence they’ve had on the person you’ve become. And the more independent you’ve felt, the more frustrating that is. They’re like the algorithms I mentioned in the previous post, controlling your life in ways you can’t possibly comprehend until decades have flown by and the cumulative effects of the things they’ve told you and shown you begin to slowly come into relief.

Me, at 40