16 Things I Wish They Had Taught Me In School

I am still an undergraduate now. I don’t think about the past or
regret things much these days.
But sometimes I wish that I had known some of
things I have learned over the last few years a
bit earlier.
So here are 16 things I wish they had taught
me in school (or I just would like to have
known about earlier)

1. The 80/20 rule.
This is one of the best ways to make better use
of your time. The 80/20 rule – also known as
The Pareto Principle – basically says that 80
percent of the value you will receive will come
from 20 percent of your activities.
So a lot of what you do is probably not as
useful or even necessary to do as you may
think.
You can just drop – or vastly decrease the time
you spend on – a whole bunch of things.
And if you do that you will have more time and
energy to spend on those things that really
brings your value, happiness, fulfilment and so
on.

2. Parkinson’s Law.
You can do things quicker than you think. This
law says that a task will expand in time and
seeming complexity depending on the time you
set aside for it. For instance, if you say to
yourself that you’ll come up with a solution
within a week then the problem will seem to
grow more difficult and you’ll spend more and
more time trying to come up with a solution.
So focus your time on finding solutions. Then
just give yourself an hour (instead of the whole
day) or the day (instead of the whole week) to
solve the problem. This will force your mind to
focus on solutions and action.
The result may not be exactly as perfect as if
you had spent a week on the task, but as
mentioned in the previous point, 80 percent of
the value will come from 20 percent of the
activities anyway. Or you may wind up with a
better result because you haven’t
overcomplicated or overpolished things. This
will help you to get things done faster, to
improve your ability to focus and give you more
free time where you can totally focus on what’s
in front of you instead of having some looming
task creating stress in the back of your mind.

3. Batching.
Boring or routine tasks can create a lot of
procrastination and low-level anxiety. One
good way to get these things done quickly is to
batch them. This means that you do them all in
row. You will be able to do them quicker
because there is less start-up time� compared
to if you spread them out. And when you are
batching you become fully engaged in the tasks
and more focused.
A batch of things to do in an hour today may
look like this: Clean your desk / answer today’s
emails / do the dishes / make three calls /
write a grocery shopping list for tomorrow.

4. First, give value. Then, get value. Not the
other way around.
This is a bit of a counter-intuitive thing. There
is often an idea that someone should give us
something or do something for us before we
give back. The problem is just that a lot of
people think that way. And so far less than
possible is given either way.
If you want to increase the value you receive
(money, love, kindness, opportunities etc.) you
have to increase the value you give. Because
over time you pretty much get what you give. It
would perhaps be nice to get something for
nothing. But that seldom happens.

5. Be proactive. Not reactive.
This one ties into the last point. If everyone is
reactive then very little will get done. You could
sit and wait and hope for someone else to do
something. And that happens pretty often, but
it can take a lot of time before it happens.
A more useful and beneficial way is to be
proactive, to simply be the one to take the first
practical action and get the ball rolling. This
not only saves you a lot of waiting, but is also
more pleasurable since you feel like you have
the power over your life. Instead of feeling like
you are run by a bunch of random outside
forces.

6. Mistakes and failures are good.
When you are young you just try things and fail
until you learn. As you grow a bit older, you
learn from – for example – school to not make
mistakes. And you try less and less things.
This may cause you to stop being proactive
and to fall into a habit of being reactive, of
waiting for someone else to do something. I
mean, what if you actually tried something and
failed? Perhaps people would laugh at you?
Perhaps they would. But when you experience
that you soon realize that it is seldom the end
of the world. And a lot of the time people don’t
care that much. They have their own
challenges and lives to worry about.
And success in life often comes from not giving
up despite mistakes and failure. It comes from
being persistent.
When you first learn to ride your bike you may
fall over and over. Bruise a knee and cry a bit.
But you get up, brush yourself off and get on
the saddle again. And eventually you learn how
to ride a bike. If you can just reconnect to your

5 year old self and do things that way –
instead of giving up after a try/failure or two as
grown-ups often do -you would probably
experience a lot more interesting things, learn
valuable lessons and have quite a bit more
success.

7. Don’t beat yourself up.
Why do people give up after just few mistakes
or failures? Well, I think one big reason is
because they beat themselves up way too
much. But it’s a kinda pointless habit. It only
creates additional and unnecessary pain inside
you and wastes your precious time. It’s best to
try to drop this habit as much as you can.

8. Assume rapport.
Meeting new people is fun. But it can also
induce nervousness. We all want to make a
good first impression and not get stuck in an
awkward conversation.
The best way to do this that I have found so far
is to assume rapport. This means that you
simply pretend that you are meeting one of your
best friends. Then you start the interaction in
that frame of mind instead of the nervous one.

9. Use your reticular activation system to your advantage.I learned about the organs and the inner workings of the body in class but nobody told me about the reticular activation system. And that’s a shame, because this is one of the most powerful things you can learn about. What this focus system, this R.A.S, in your mind does is to allow you to see in your surroundings what you focus your thoughts on. It pretty much always helps you to find what you are looking for.So you really need to focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want. And keep that focus steady.Setting goals and reviewing them frequently is one way to keep your focus on what’s important and to help you take action that will move your closer to toward where you wantto go.

10. Your attitude changes your reality.We have all heard that you should keep a positive attitude or perhaps that “you need to change your attitude!”. That is a nice piece of advice I suppose, but without any more reasons to do it is very easy to just brush such suggestions off and continue using your old attitude.But the thing that I’ve discovered the last few years is that if you change your attitude, you actually change your reality. When you for instance use a positive attitude instead of a negative one you start to see things and viewpoints that were invisible to you before. You may think to yourself“why haven’t I thought about things this way before?”.When you change your attitude you change what you focus on. And all things in your world can now be seenin a different light.This is of course very similar to the previous tip but I wanted to give this one some space. Because changing your attitude can create an insane change in your world. It might not look like it if you just think about it though. Pessimism might seem like realism. But that is mostly because your R.A.S is tuned into seeing all thenegative things you want to see. And that makes you “right” a lot of the time. And perhaps that is what you want. On the other hand, there are more fun things than being right all the time.If you try changing your attitude for real – instead of analysing such a concept in your mind – you’ll be surprised.

11. Gratitude is a simple way to makeyourself feel happy.Sure, I was probably told that I shouldbe grateful. Perhaps because it was the right thing to do or just something I should do. But if someone had said that feeling grateful about things for minute or two is a great way to turn a negative mood into a happy one I would probably have practised gratitude more. It is also a good tool for keeping your attitude up and focusing on the right things. And to make other people happy. Which tends to make you even happier, since emotions are contagious.

12. Don’t compare yourself to others.The ego wants to compare. It wants to find reasons for you to feel good about yourself (“I’ve got a new bike!”). But by doing that it also becomes very hard to not compare yourself to others who have more than you (“Oh no, Bill has bought an even nicer bike!”). And so you don’t feel so good about yourself once again. If you compare yourself to others you let the world around control how you feel about yourself. It always becomes a rollercoaster of emotions.A more useful way is to compare yourself to yourself. To look at how far you have come, what you have accomplished and how you have grown. It may not sound like that much fun but in the long run it brings a lot more inner stillness, personal power and positive feelings.

13. 80-90% of what you fear will happen never really come into reality.This is a big one. Most things you fear will happen never happen. They are just monsters in your own mind. And if they happen then they will most often not be as painful or bad as you expected. Worrying is most often just a waste of time. This is of course easy to say. But if you remind yourself of how little of what you feared throughout your life that has actually happened you can start to release more and more of that worry from your thoughts.

14. Don’t take things too seriously.It’s very easy to get wrapped up in things. But most of the things you worry about never come into reality. And what may seem like a big problem right now you may not even remember in three years.Taking yourself, your thoughts and your emotions too seriously often just seems to lead to more unnecessary suffering. So relax a little more and lighten up a bit. It can do wonders for your mood and as an extension of that; your life.

15. Write everything down.If your memory is anything like mine then it’s like a leaking bucket. Many of your good or great ideas may be lost forever if you don’t make a habit of writing things down. This is also a good way to keep your focus on whatyou want.

16. There are opportunities in just about every experience.In pretty much any experience there are always things that you can learn from it and things within the experience that can help you to grow.Negative experiences, mistakes and failure can sometimes be even betterthan a success because it teaches you something totally new, something that another success could never teach you.Whenever you have a “negative experience” ask yourself: where is the opportunity in this? What is good about this situation? One negative experience can – with time – help you create many very positive experiences.What do you wish someone had told you in school or you had just learned earlier in life?