On living, plainly
On attention, desire, will, and what a life is for — drawing on Stoic and Buddhist ideas, plainly put.
Make peace with imperfection, in yourself and others
Our brains were never engineered for the scale and strain of modern life, so the demand to be perfectly rational and good, whether aimed at ourselves or at everyone we disagree with, is doomed from the start. Accepting that opens a calmer place to stand: forgive yourself your mistakes, extend the same benefit of the doubt to everyone else, and let 'good enough' actually be good enough.
Invest your time and attention like a value investor
The tools value investors use on capital, inversion, avoiding turnarounds, refusing to average down on losers, work just as well on where you spend your time and attention. Prune the relationships and habits that consistently drain you, pour energy into the few that reliably give back, and remember to water the flowers rather than the weeds.
Go positive, go first, then cultivate the givers
Negativity bias makes us default to neutral with strangers, because the occasional cold response stings more than the many warm ones reward, and so we forfeit most of the good that going first would bring. The remedy is deliberate generosity: become the trustworthy, kind person everyone is quietly searching for, give freely without keeping score, then cultivate the givers over the takers.
Save your best behavior for those closest to you
For years the author gave careful, considered behavior to strangers while handing his bluntest, most unfiltered self to the people closest to him, on the theory that loved ones would read his intentions charitably anyway. The painful correction is that those nearest to you are the most sensitive to your carelessness, not the least, so the people who earned your trust deserve more care, not less.
If free will is an illusion, compassion follows
If our conscious choices are merely after-the-fact reports of decisions the brain already made, and if genes, upbringing, and circumstance we never chose shaped that brain, then free will begins to look like an illusion. Following that thought through the tragic case of Charles Whitman leads somewhere unexpectedly gentle: if people are closer to weather patterns than free agents, blame gives way to compassion.
Emotions are passing sensations, not who you are
As adults we stopped treating a stubbed toe or a bee sting as an identity-defining catastrophe, because we know the pain will pass. Emotions deserve the same treatment: anger and sadness are passing sensations, not who you are, and they fade on their own unless you keep them alive by telling yourself stories about what happened.
Size your response to its future impact, not its trigger
Viktor Frankl located our freedom in the space between stimulus and response, and this turns that space into a usable rule: the size of your reaction should match the future good it can do, not the size of whatever provoked it. Road rage after a near-miss is effort spent on a danger already past, while a thank-you note costs almost nothing and can quietly reroute a life.