Here are this week’s Life Pro Tips.
1. Save the packing list from your camping trip.
When you get home, add the things you forgot, remove what you brought but didn’t need and then save the list for your next trip.
2. While talking to anyone cross-eyed/lazy eyed / anything else that makes eye contact difficult, look at the bridge of their nose. You appear to be making eye contact with them without having to worry about making either of you uncomfortable.
3. Pay more attention to what losers do wrong than to what winners do right.
Survivorship bias causes us to pay more attention to what the winners do right. We read articles about the “ten habits of successful people.” We think “Oh, Zuckerberg dropped out of college, so it’s better to drop out than finish my degree.” We do a countless number of crazy and useless things just because some successful person is doing it with almost no regard to how many unsuccessful people are doing the same thing.
The truth is, most successful people don’t actually know why they’re successful. Sure Zuckerberg would say that dropping out of college made him rich, and he’d be right, but that’s only a tiny fraction of what made him a billionaire. Timing, relationships, hard work, family support and a huge helping of luck are what make most people successful.
That’s not to say we should ignore successful people. Of course, it’s helpful to look at what they do right, but we need to put much more weight on the mistakes that unsuccessful people make or we’ll miss a huge piece of the puzzle.
4. When lost in a new city, ask for directions from someone walking a dog.
Especially when exploring a tourist city, it can be hard to know who to ask. Someone walking a dog is most likely a local and will have good walking directions. Also asking about their cute dog is a great ice breaker for anyone nervous about asking a stranger for directions.
5. If you are creating a PowerPoint presentation especially for a large conference make sure to build it in 16:9 ratio for optimal viewer quality.
90% of the time, the screen your presentation will project onto will be 16:9 format. The “standard” 4:3 screens are outdated and are on Death’s door, if not already in Death’s garbage can. TVs, mobile devices, theater screens – everything you view media content on is 16:9/widescreen. Avoid the black side bars you get with showing your laborious presentation that was built in 4:3. AV techs can stretch your content to fill the 16:9 screen, but if you have graphics or photos, your masterpiece will look like garbage.
I disagree completely with #3 as someone with experience in creating success. I’d like to ask, have you ever actually met or talked to someone who is massively successful? I have the privilege of working with many successful retired multimillionaires from multiple fields (and of being close to retirement myself at the age of 30), and I can guarantee this: it wasn’t luck, and they know exactly how they got there. Yes, there may have been a lucky break or 2, but they were positioned properly to take advantage of it because of the prep work. I do agree completely about not copying methods because someone successful did it, but mainly because there are a lot of other principles/methods in play with each “tip”. Also, it’s usually through failure that they learned how to be successful. I sincerely hope you have the chance to eventually meet someone who is actually successful, but please, before making statements like that, consult with someone who can actually talk about being successful, not just who has some ideas about it.
No, they _think_ they know how they did it.
That doesn’t mean they’re right. Consider all the CEOs who run multiple businesses into the ground; if they managed by luck to turn one around, they’d ‘know’ exactly what they did right, despite the fact that it ruined multiple other businesses.