Video: John Green on "What should I do with my life"

"Study widely and without fear."

Self-censorship is giving someone else your life

(from: http://fjordlord.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/the-good-the-bad-and-the-silent-when-the-media-wont-tell-the-whole-story)

There's a difference between knowing when to keep your mouth shut and removing parts of your life, and we're talking about the second one here. It could be a political issue, but really I'm talking about the personal level: say you just broke up with someone or lost a good friend to a bad fight or were fired from a job. If you go back through your history--all your pictures and belongings and blog posts and mementos--and remove everything that reminds you of that thing you lost, you're letting them win. You're willingly handing over a part of your own life, and you're therefore giving it up, declaring that your own experience doesn't matter and isn't important enough to keep, to metabolize, to make sense of.

Sounds dumb, doesn't it?

It's a symptom of victim mentality, really. If your own experiences don't matter enough to keep and to learn from, does anything you do or say even belong to you? And if you don't own your own mind, your own past, who does?

So don't do it. Don't excise the painful parts. Don't give up your own life because it hurts. The sore parts are the parts that define what we do in the future, and who we are when we come out of it. Instead, learn from them. Work through them. Feel the pain and feel your way out of it. Speak out against it happening again, to yourself or to others. Own it. Let yourself define your experience, and not let the reaction to the experience define you.

Rules to Live By #5: More flavor means more satisfaction with your meal, even if it's really simple

Corollary 1: More satisfaction means you feel fulfilled, even when you're eating less. Which is the goal. Corollary 2: Flavor comes from more than just salt and fat; herbs, sauces, spices and vegetables have a whole lot of flavor, too.

Rules to Live By: 1 to 4

One of the ways I'm trying to improve my life is to have a defined set of rules to live by. I used to have note cards covered in rules when I was in highschool and I thought I could change the world, but they've all gone missing in the 20 or so moves since then, and I find I miss them. So I'm starting over from scratch. I'm a different person than I was then anyway, and I should  have new rules.

Maybe one day I'll publish all my rules together, when there's enough to form a book out of them, but I really think that while some will be universal, a lot of them are going to be personal, geared to correcting and improving my own individual quirks and weaknesses, and I think that's how it should be. The reason while societies lose their strict rules is because they don't apply to everyone, and people start bending and shifting them. People need their own sets of guidelines, and they should make their own. It's an extension of the first rule:

1. Be Accountable.
Whatever choices you make in life, you've made them, and you're the one responsible for how they turn out. That also means that you're the one responsible for how your life goes, and if you want it to be a certain way, you're the one to make it that way.

2. Don't be a dick.
This one's borrowed from Wil Wheton, and it very concisely says how to treat others--if what you're doing seems like something that you'd call someone a dick for doing to you, don't do it.

3. You aren't entitled.
Nobody is entitled. The world doesn't owe you anything you haven't earned, so if you want something, go out and earn it. Even if you're born to millions of dollars, go out and be worthy of getting them.

4. Do it now.
Whatever you're doing, don't put it off. I'm terrible about this, I put off all sorts of things even when I don't realize that I am, and it makes a backlog that I never quite catch up with. It's a constant struggle to keep up-to-date, and I'm getting better (I miss very few deadlines anymore), but it's necessary to keep it visible.

More will come, and they'll likely get more specific as I go, but here's the first four. What are your first four rules to live by?