Lessons My Father Taught Me

My father and I had one of those "complex" parent-child relationships, and to a degree, we still do. Still, despite our disagreements, I regard my father as a very wise man. I was thinking of the things that I learned from him, and boiled it down to this list of the most important/interesting things. Sure, most of them are simple aphorisms, but having had the opportunity to grow into them from when I was a child somehow makes them seem deep and profound, in a way that things you understand the first time you hear them don't.

People in Hell want ice water. (I hated hearing this as a child, but as I've grown older, I come to really understand that it's true on a surprising number of levels.)

The definition of "obvious" is something that is so crystal-clear that you are the only person who can see it.

There are two kinds of people in the world. People who believe that you can divide everyone in the world into two groups - and people with some sense.

If you don't know what you're doing, stop doing it until you do.

The trick to getting someone to like you is not to do something for them - it's to get them to do something for you.

There are two people on either side of every job. The person that takes a job, and the person that gives a job. One of these positions is better to be in than the other.

The one way to become rich by doing a job is to do a job that other people can't do, or that other people won't do.

There's little point to redistributing wealth. The problem that most people have isn't that they don't know how to obtain money - it's that they don't know how to keep it, and therefore, most of the money will eventually wind up back where it started.