What is the best advise you have ever received.

I actually heard this one from a friend’s father at a group dinner back in college. He said something along the lines of:

When you’re figuring out what to do with your life, I think it’s a mistake to first decide what you want to do and then move to best location to do that thing. Instead, pick the place where you really want to live and go there. Your career will work itself out wherever you go.

Now, years later, looking at my own experiences and those of my friends, this definitely seems right on. A) It’s hard to stay happy for very long if you’re in a place you don’t like—whether because the culture rubs you the wrong way or you’re too far from people you care about or you’re neglecting some yearning to be somewhere else. And B) career paths are twisty and surprising and totally unpredictable anyway, and people never seem to end up where they planned.

Of course, certain professions are tied to one particular location, but most aren’t. So if you’re at a crossroads, and you’ve always wanted to live in San Francisco, but you have a connection that can get you a good job in your home town or somewhere else you feel lackluster about—move to San Francisco with no job. You’ll figure things out when you get there.As it turns out, people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they’re not. Now you might look at this result and say, okay, sure, on average people are less happy when they’re mind-wandering, but surely when their minds are straying away from something that wasn’t very enjoyable to begin with, at least then mind-wandering should be doing something good for us. Nope. As it turns out, people are less happy when they’re mind-wandering no matter what they’re doing. For example, people don’t really like commuting to work very much. It’s one of their least enjoyable activities, and yet they are substantially happier when they’re focused only on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else. It’s amazing. “Having confidence leads to other behaviors; like speaking up, raising your hand, taking risks, having a voice at the table,” she says.“Faking it” doesn’t mean being inauthentic, but consciously practicing a skill until it becomes natural. “It’s like muscle memory. You have to practice, you have to get through the fear part of it, until it becomes a natural habit,” says Killelea.There’s something we’ve been taught that just doesn’t hold anymore. What my parents taught me, what your parents taught you, just doesn’t work anymore; at least not like it once did… benefit of the doubt. We teach people that it’s a good thing to do, that it’s the Christian thing to do; it’s the positive thing to do to give our fellow man the benefit of the doubt. Why would you do that? Why would you give somebody you don’t know the benefit of the doubt? If we said “Ok, here’s what I want you to do… go out in your life and JUDGE everybody negatively” you’d go “I’m not going to do that”. Then WHY would you go out and judge them POSITIVELY?