Often in the course of a week, I find myself thinking, “Man, I wish I’d have known that when I was ten.” I’m jotting down those tidbits that came to mind:

1.     Always fill up your gas tank. It took my wife’s habit of creating peace of mind to drill this into my head, but nothing beats the capacity to travel freely. When we get a paycheck, the first thing I do is fill up her tank. I wish we had a water car so that the earth was better for it, but we don’t unfortunately—big auto squelched those patents. In any case, there’s freedom on the open road that I’ve never found elsewhere. In addition, I still remember when my friend Taylor came back from the mechanic in highschool. “Had to replace the fuel pump,” she said. “Turns out it’s hard on my car when I only put in a quarter tank.” Like all of us in high school, she tried to save where she could. Turned out that the extra money for a full tank of gas would have saved the cost of replacing a fuel pump. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere…

2.     Reinvest Profits. If you go out and spend the first profit you make, it will also be the last profit you make. If, however, you find a way to reinvest even a portion of it, the profits multiply tenfold. There were three servants to whom a master gave ten talents, five talents and one talent…

3.     In real life, there’s always a loser (and thank God for that). I groaned the first (and last) time I saw American Idol. All of these entrants to this contest had been told their entire life by family that they were special, that they could do anything they wanted when they grew up. Turns out they can’t sing for crap and they had to find out on national television. No, losers exist and losing is the real way to win. People realize now that every rung on the ladder of success is one failure after another. Every time you fail at something, you only refine your vision for who you were made to be. For instance, I used to get picked last for every sport as a kid. It didn’t take long for me to discover the word that rhymed with athlete: aesthete. Jesus said, “the last shall be first” because when you’re meek, you’ve got the whole world to inherit. If the cultural shift toward geekology and nerddom taught us anything, it’s that losers tend to win in the long run.

4.     Libraries are sunken merchant ships waiting to be commandeered by forward-thinking pirates. Every. Single. Time. Every single time I go to the library, I learn about something new that I could learn there: Free indy movies and documentaries. Old film rolls dating back to the late 19^th century. Books on how to brush up your Aikido, dog training, knitting, surfing, hunting, protesting, Trivium. Audiobooks on tape that I can play in my silver Ford Escort ZX2’s tape deck. Reference librarians who, like Feruchemists that store memories, dig up answers to the most obscure questions. Writer’s, photographer’s, poet’s, songwriter’s markets. Etymology reference books. Every periodical you could ever hope to read. HARDBOUND GRAPHIC NOVELS. Grant listings. GRE, ACT, SAT and other standardized test preps. Archives of Life, Time, People, National Geographic. Free computer programs to learn new languages. Biographies on the most obscure people imaginable. Volumes and volumes and volumes of free and up-to-date fiction. VHS copies of films like Ghandi and The Seventh Seal and Singin’ In The Rain. Free checkout for Nook, Kindle. ETC.

5.     Pilfering leads to prison, but integrity cultivates accomplices. People don’t realize that a penny stolen’s a penny lost. Cheat on your taxes, it catches up to you. Keep the jewler’s loupe from the diamond store, it’ll eat you alive. Bit torrent films, get cease and desist letters from large production companies. Illegally download a song every day, end up in jail. However, if you’re honest with people, returning what’s not yours even if, in some dark past, you stole it in the first place you’ll make a crowd of friends. People love honesty and the hardest parts of my childhood were when my father made me return stolen toys. I’m forever grateful to him for those embarrassing moments.

6.     Never loan—give or sell instead. One way or another, a loan with interest ends up using people. When you give, you take the initiative and chose to be the one taken advantage of, to be spent for the sake of another. When you sell without interest or credit, you ask the other person to wait until they can afford it. Both ways extend the basic courtesy of clear expectations, boundaries and help.

7.     Never borrow—trade or buy instead. One way or another, borrowing money turns you into another man’s slave. When you trade, you give worth both to your craft and to the craft of the other person. Trades say, “Our crafts (or possessions) are equally valuable.” When you buy without credit or interest, you live within your means and will never find yourself in the position of having to pawn the tools of your trade to eat.

8.     In all negotiations, three things win: silence, questions, cash. Silence forces the other person to speak first and whoever hears the most words, wins. Questions orient the other person as the bearer of knowledge and let you learn more than them—he who is the greatest learner longest wins. Cash… well cash is cash and tips (#18) are merely socially acceptable bribes, and both are grease on the economic engine.

9.     “Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps his mouth shut.”

10.  In performance, friendship & counseling—defer everything to empathy. Until you resonate with the plight of the other, of your neighbor, of your friend, until you attempt to feel what they feel, to walk alongside them in an emotional time, you will never perform, befriend or counsel well.

11.   There’s nothing more powerful than a peacemaking, joyful, suffering Christian. Mother Theresa. Martin Luther King Jr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Jim Elliot. St. Francis of Assissi. James Hudson Taylor. Brother Lawrence. Desmond Tutu. Rosa Parks. Dorothy Day. Albert Schweitzer. Harriet Tubman. Teresa of Avila. Henri Nouwen. John of the Cross. Susan B. Anthony. Sojourner Truth. William Wilberforce. John Wyclif. I could go on and on…

12.  A sentence a day keeps the Prozac away. My journals started with sentences like this: Ate lunch. Was good. An education, more than anything, teaches a person to express their thoughts and feelings. What’s the point of being educated if you refuse to learn from the greats and also refuse to process what you’ve learned? Mark Twain said, “He who has the capacity to read great books and does not has no advantage over the man who cannot.” The same is true on the other end of literacy. He who has the capacity to write great books and does not has no advantage over him who cannot. Writing helps us process—so go make an entry in a diary or journal or blog or letter, regardless of whether it’s public.

13.  Positive thinking does nothing to keep the sky from falling. The most positive man I know got cancer and because he had yet to temper his positivity with suffering, it waned. Now that the cancer’s in remission, his hopeful words returned with a depth they lacked before. Positive thinking that refuses to account for things like Crone’s disease can help no one.

14.  Few things change the world so quickly as a children’s story whose time has come. Brother’s Grimm. Anderson. Dr. Suess. Aesop. Harry Potter. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. The Hobbit. The Wizard of Oz. Alice in Wonderland. The Light Princess. Camelot. Robin Hood. Uncle Remus. Peter Pan. A Christmas Carol. Where the Wild Things Are. Wall-E. Or, on the negative end of the spectrum, Hilter Youth.

15.  Society was, is, and will always be oral before anything. Write, film, compose, act, design, engineer and speak first for the ear and mouth. The ear and mouth are the conduits of language, language is the vehicle of relational thought and relational thought, as the framework of our understanding, separates us from the brutes. Start with the ear in mind. Ask any good cinematographer: you cannot have good video without good audio.

16.  Devil’s in the details. I remember Warren Buffet telling a story about a company owner who was charged for his toilet paper by the sheet. I think he was purchasing it in bundles of 50,000 or something with 500 sheets per roll. He decided to take out a roll and count the squares—each roll turned out to hold only 415 sheets. He called up the paper company and they reimbursed him immediately to keep him quiet. When I think of purchasing a new service that only costs $9.99 per month or what have you, I immediately multiply that by twelve. $10 x 12 months = $120 in a year. That’s ten textbooks or two drums of toner or a road trip worth of gas or five new pairs of jeans. Is the service worth that exchange for the next however many years? If not, I refuse which is the main reason I still don’t have Netflix, a smart phone, cable, internet or magazine subscriptions. I’m not a hermit, but I’m not an idiot either. I don’t need social status—I can borrow movies from the library, drive an old car, use a simple phone, use free internet at the library or even eight cups of coffee price out cheaper than $75/per month internet. Simplicity makes our lives less rushed and less pressured to pay for status. In that list tiny list of five services, I’m saving about $2,065 per year. That’s enough for nearly two 100-share blocks of Activision stock or for another car, friends, and indeed I’ve kept my little Ford running well in that time, which in turn helps save more on car insurance. Key phrase? It all adds up. This applies to more than money, by the way…

17.  Work hard when it’s time to work, play hard when it’s time to play, cry hard when it’s time to cry, laugh hard when it’s time to laugh. Don’t sleep at work, work. Don’t work on your day off, sleep or throw a frizbee with your kids. Don’t laugh at someone when they’re crying, cry with them. Don’t frown when everyone else is laughing, laugh with them. This leads to a life well-lived in the moment, focused on the needs of those who interrupt your precious plans. There’s a time for everything under the sun. Take things in their season—whether wabbit or duck.

18.  Tip well. Waiters, busboys, barristas and cabbies make crap for wages. Absolute crap. They depend on the generosity of the public to keep them going (which is also a critique on their employers). Every theatre director and college president knows not to tick off the techies. Every good citizen should know not to tick off their cabbies… or waitresses.

19.  Find your voice. You have a unique way saying things, you just don’t know it yet. When you learn to speak for yourself based on thoughts you’ve thought for yourself, you’ll start to be you.

20.  When you gather with others, location and demographic say something about your group. Big-sized groups say something about identity. Medium-sized groups say something about service. Small groups say something about intimacy. I owe this thinking to Doug, but what does the company you keep say about you? Are you proud of that?

21.  The poetry of film is the visual symbol.  Films should be judged based on the grammar they create, not isolated moments throughout. We say this often and it’s true: it’s more than just the sum of its component parts. We could apply this to many cultural artifacts…

22.  “The most powerful force in the universe is compounded interest.” – Einstein The brilliant old Jew was making a statement about relativity, but it applies to everything from money to wisdom to raising kids to personal devotion to creativity. This is akin to “reinvest profits” – if you take everything your own and then you compound it all, the next time everything will bring back more. This speaks lest about reinvestment and more about consistency—over time, a consistent compounding of interest pays dividends. See also Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule and Collins’ flywheel.

23.  History is story, science is observation, theology is talk of God (or gods or lack thereof). These and every other discipline must abide by the rules of their established grammars. Science teaches us how to hypothesize and observe—therefore it can’t tell us anything about dead dinosaurs none of us observed alive. History teaches us how to interpret past events through the filter of a narrative—therefore it helps us understand less about what happened and more about who we are now (Cartography and Paleontology fit in as a sub-categories, for instance). Theology is literally “God words,” and therefore theology uses a different grammar. To switch grammars mid-sentence is to be irresponsible and deceitful to people unacquainted with the disciplines you understand. Do not do this. It’s not fighting fair.

24.  Know when to refer. I learned this from counselors, but if the problem’s beyond your skill or expertise, go up. Refer above you. Pass the project onto someone more qualified. This will save you embarrassment, time and headaches. Or, in the words of Gandalf:

This foe is beyond any of you. RUN!

25.  Learn to learn first, or “mind over matter.” This comes from Trivium, which we’ve talked about before, but the question “When am I going to use this in real life?” says nothing about the subject in question, whether math or science or history. THAT question is a question about learning itself. The Trivium (logic, rhetoric, grammar) taught children first how to learn, how to enjoy learning, how to seek wisdom. Trivium worked as an intransitive education, focusing on the mind until the mind bloomed. Quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy) worked as transitive education, focusing on the matter at hand and teaching specific tasks or bits of information. “Mind over matter” comes from the idea that the mind must first blossom before anything else… well… matters. You can’t use any of education’s tasks or information “in real life” until you first learn how to learn and then apply things to real life.

26.  The Revelation of John isn’t an acid trip, a justification for nationalistic violence, or a book of esoteric secrets like in National Treasure, Left Behind, or Nostradamus’s works. Rather, it’s a prophetic letter of hope (and political satire) written to seven very different churches all living in the first century under an oppressive empire. One was too rich for its own good. One suffered under terrible violence and persecution. One was too religions for its own good. One suffered from terrible poverty. Two lived completely inconsistently with their stated ethics. One was so old they refused to make healthy changes. To those seven churches, John wrote this challenge: persevere, stand fast, overcome. Understood like that, people who live in an oppressive empire can still catch a vision for overcoming in spite of great opposition and peer pressure. Stand true and overcome when you live under oppression or under the influence of seduction. That, I think, speaks to every human alive.