What's the best piece of advice you were ever given?

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Originally Posted by ccmdfd

That sounds about right.

I knew a couple, they were both doctors and residents in our training program where I worked at the time. At that time residents typically made roughly $30,000 a year.

When most doctors finally graduate from their residency and get a real job with real physician pay, they quickly by the big house, big car, fancy watch, Etc.

Well this couple didn't. They continue to live in the same place, Drive the same car, live off of roughly $60,000 a year while making a heck of a lot more than that. They retired after working only 10 years or so. In their early forties. Heck, maybe late thirties.

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I have a buddy like that. Early 40s and about to retire and move overseas where he had a mountain house built.

He saved his money, never made rash purchases, never made emotional purchases and now he can retire.

He never took out loans and paid for college out of pocket. Bought a modest house under $200k in early 00s. Always drove clean but inexpensive used cars. They were always small 4cyl Japanese/Korean sedans or coups costing roughly $3k - $5k so there was no financing involved, no monthly payments or interest rates. Some were manual trans, some had manual windows. Didn't care about the latest and greatest tech (one accidentally didn't have an AC [emoji16]). In the 25 years that I've known him he's probably had 3 or 4 cars and that's because one was totaled.

Saved some money by doing car and house maintenance himself.

Today his house is almost paid off, just in time for this crazy seller's market, it has like doubled in value, meanwhile he has no debt, no credit card balances, nothing thats forcing him to work into his 60s and a healthy bank account.

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I've heard a few.

• An expert is the guy who gets the basics right every time.
• There are no advanced shooting skills, only the basics applied under conditions of increasing difficulty.
• Only kind people are truly strong.
• Not everything is a problem. Some things are facts. Your options for dealing with them are different.
• The important things are simple. Simple things are hard.
• The nicest dog in the world will bite you if you fuck with it long enough.
• Minimize gear, maximize ability.
• Don’t overthink things. The classics are classics for a reason.
• Practice—and the familiarity that results from it—are far more important than hardware.
• Strunk & White are always right.
• You don’t have to floss all of your teeth, just the ones you want to keep.
• You can’t do much to make an injury heal more quickly. You can do a lot to make it heal more slowly.

Okie John

First one that came to mind was "never count another man's money"

Maybe the best maybe not? But I didn't heed it.

Fresh out of college my 1st day working as an engineer. I was Grumman Aerospace working in a group where a couple of the old timers had worked on the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). My boss tells me I want you to work with John P. he will show you the ropes. Then John stands up from his desk on the other side of the wall made by a long row of file cabinets. John says to me, "Hey kid, so you are a newly minted engineer (with a little twang added to "engineer" for effect). I'll bet your mom is a nurse and your dad is an engineer?" Me, "Yes, how do you know that?". John says, "that's the typical profile." Then John goes on to say, "Let me give you a piece of advice. Forget you ever went to school for engineering. Get out of here now. Don't let the door hit you in the ass." The rest is a little fuzzy but John went on to tell me about someone he knew who started on the loading dock of Macy's Department Store who worked his way up to a vice-president making more money than "I would ever make as an engineer". That was an interesting 1st day of work.

Now that I've thought a bit. Probably the best ever piece of advice was from my dad. "No problem is impossible to solve unless you don't try. Start by writing down what you know, the information given. Put it in a logical order. Write down any other perinate information, e.g. formulas. Draw a diagram. Now you are off to a good start and have something to work with." That served me well and I always stressed that with my kids.

My oldest son, I kept telling him over and over again to write everything down in math, "show all your work". He would skip writing down all the easy for him steps and go straight for the answer. Forever I thought I couldn't get through his thick skull (he was homeschooled). He called me from college right after a math final exam. He said there were 4 questions on the test and he only answered 3 before he ran out of time. So he thought the best he could do was a 75% if he got everything correct.

My son called me when he got the results back and said, "Dad remember how you always told me to show all my work and set up each problem? Well I set up that last problem on the math final but ran out of time. My professor gave me almost full credit for the problem. He wrote on the exam that the answer was apparent based on how the problem was setup". He finally became a believer. He got somewhere in the 90's.

"Run, you dumb son of a bitch!"

"What you allow is what will continue." - My favorite boss. Learned a lot of leadership lessons from that guy.

I’ve had a lot of good advice over the years—shockingly little of which I may have followed to a T. A couple of gems that have stood the test of time:

“The book you don’t read won’t help you.”
-Jim Rohn

“80 percent of success is showing up.”
-Woody Allen, per various

“When something in life is clearly falling apart, often the most useful endeavor is to keep the things that aren’t from following suit.”
-my dad

My PhD advisor said something like, "You don't have to be the best at anything to succeed at the highest level. You just have to work hard and be able to do everything required at an acceptable level. If you can't do something, that's a problem. So fix that."

I've had this gem of advice from several mentors, in academics and in combatives: "The path to success is paved with failure".

Next one might not qualify exactly as advice given, certainly not to me directly but I thought it so profound I'm going to share it. It was a shared with me by someone who worked with Gen Austin Miller and judged him the single finest leader they had worked with in their 20 year Infantry and SOF career.

"The true test of a Soldier is the willingness to RE-ENTER a kill zone." - Gen Austin Miller


Bio

"In 1992, Miller completed a specialized selection course and operator training course for assignment to 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment – Delta (1st SFOD-D), or Delta Force at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he held numerous leadership positions including squadron operations officer, troop commander, operational support troop commander, selection and training commander, A Squadron commander, as well as deputy commander and unit commanding officer from 2005 to 2007."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_S._Miller

"If you ask God to give you more patience, he will give you the opportunity to develop patience. You don't just get these qualities out of the blue, from the heavens. You get the chance to develop them."

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