wisdom comes suddenly
i've been in one of those thinking moods lately. and rather than ranting, as i usually do, for way too long, i decided to ask you to rant.
i went out tonight with a bunch of people from work, and i remember telling a story about something someone told me in high school that for some reason seemed to change my life and the way i see things*. as i was walking home from downtown, i had some time to think: there are so many things that i have learned from other people that have struck me, whether brilliant or mundane.
for example, mr oetter, my senior year english teacher, said something that i'll never forget. when talking about hypothetical dates, he said "suppose you go on a date. the date goes really well, you have a lot in common, the conversation was never awkward, she smells nice..." when i first heard this, the last part seemed out of place. "what?" i thought. and then about a week later, i realized that this was one of the truest things i've ever heard, that i had never thought of before.
anyway, the point of this post: what have you heard that seemed meaningless at first (or didn't) and somehow has stuck with you since? what is something someone told you that seems now to be so much wiser than you could imagine? what advice will you never forget?
*in my senior year of high school, michael abrahmson, one of the smartest guys i knew, told me something i'll never forget. i've always believed that everything can be reduced to numbers, and graphing different systems will yield some sort of pattern. we were talking about computer animation and how you could predict, using physics, how a ball would bounce. then i asked why people haven't figured out how to model water splashing. pixar modeled water with elegance, but no one can predict how water will splash. and mike said to me: "it's simply too complex." for some reason, this blew my mind. and really, anything can be modeled, but to predict nearly anything is too complex.
note: the title is a reference to 13 conversations about one thing, a movie that blew my mind the first time i saw it. highly recommended.
comments:
I can't find quite the right quote, but this one is close. It's from fanfiction. It seems to me, Professor, that learning to use what I have against the other team, on even ground, is better than learning to get around the rules that don't exist, not really. I mean, you can't break the rules if there aren't any, and if there aren't any rules, all you've got is your wits. At least that's what I think.
The idea is that the reason cheating does you no favors is that, in the real world, the only rules that really exist are ones that you simply can't break. So you might as well learn how to win playing by the rules when they aren't real (like the rules of academic honesty, or the rules of a game or a sport) or you won't know how to live when, you know, the stakes are much higher. And you'll have all kinds of bad habits of trying to get around the rules (which will be impossible).
Poppy | April 27 @ 7:47pm
Hmmm, it's hard to realize this type of advice of the top of my head. I'll be thinking about it though.
Will | April 28 @ 4:42pm
Oh, also: I know this isn't quite what you're looking for, but there is only one piece of advice that I have received that I will never forget. Before I left for college, this is exactly what my Dad said to me one day after changing the brakes on his truck: "When you buy a car, if at all possible, buy one with all four wheel disk brakes. Avoid like the plague: drum brakes." :)
Poppy | April 28 @ 7:38pm