7 Pieces of Advice From Older Generations That Hit Different Now

Do young people really think they know it all?

In my opinion, young people don’t typically go around thinking they know it all. Instead, they’re probably just not thinking about it at all. Life is coming at them fast, and they’re just trying to hang on.

They go with their instincts and do what feels right, but without much consideration for other options.

It’s only later that we begin to reflect on our lives and look for ways to improve. For me, that didn’t happen until well into my 20s. Maybe young people should be more like this. But maybe, this is just something you learn through living.

I do know one thing, though: the best thing you can do for a young person is to model a better way to live and occasionally pass along helpful wisdom. But don’t force or badger them to change.

You never know when a particular piece of advice will cause something to “click,” so it’s ok to casually share these thoughts even before your friend or loved one thinks they need them.

What advice is most likely to click with a young person and cause them to reevaluate? I’ve put together a long list of ideas. Each one is something that I heard frequently growing up but eventually wrote off as old-fashioned or quaint.

Now, from my mid-30s vantage point, I have a much deeper appreciation for these bits of wisdom. I hope sharing them will give some of you a headstart in your own journey.

One day at a time

When I was young, I used to let myself get overwhelmed by the size of a project. I’d think about everything I needed to do and throw my hands up in defeat. Sometimes I’d distract myself with lesser projects, but often my default response was to procrastinate.

It turns out that our brains are not very good at intuiting how long a project will take. It’s easy to look at a new task and instantly panic about all the things you will need to do. But if you give yourself a little push and actually get started, you’ll realize that the journey is half as bad as you thought.

And the best way to do that is to break the project down to a size that feels manageable. Don’t be afraid to start small, even if the deadline is fast approaching. And remember, if you think a project will take 10 hours or 10 days, it will feel about the same squished into a single thought. The only way out is forward, and by getting started, you defang the monster and realize the task before you is not as insurmountable as it seemed.

Measure twice, cut once

In our fast-paced world, we really don’t want to hear this advice. We’d much rather try something really fast, mess up, and then fix it later. And this strategy works in a lot of cases.

But it all comes down to how costly a mistake is and how much time it takes to fix. If a particular task allows you to move fast and the cost of making a mistake is cheap, then the rough draft approach might be the way to go.

But whatever you do, don’t apply this strategy to everything, or you’ll find yourself in perpetual clean-up mode. Life has a way of handing you a lot of unexpected challenges and setbacks. For anything that is both important and can be made right with a little forethought, do yourself a favor and measure twice to save yourself a big headache.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

What is it about our human nature that makes this advice so hard to follow? In the case of physical health, which is probably the most commonly cited scenario, it’s obvious that if we exercised regularly and ate healthy food, we’d save ourselves a lot of trouble.

But we don’t. And I think the reason is simple: prevention is boring. Our brain’s built-in cost/benefit calculator is biased toward the immediate present. We know intellectually that the long-term benefits are large, but since we can’t actually imagine the future, those benefits don’t carry any emotional weight.

Even if you have a vague sense of what your next step should be, the real problem is that you don’t know where to start or if your efforts will pay off without any immediate reinforcement. That’s why the best way to make prevention stick as a habit is to surround yourself with friends or family or anyone who won’t let you off the hook.

They’ll not only make you feel accountable (a good thing), but their social approval will be like an emotional down payment on a future investment.

Many hands make light work

Why are we so slow to ask for help? I mean, on an intellectual level, I understand this advice immediately. If you don’t have enough time or energy to do something and you can call on others to assist, that’s a no-brainer.

But in practice, I rarely reach out to others for help, and instead, it feels like I have this instinct to do things on my own. I think a big factor is that most of my life I’ve been a student trying to earn good grades, and that habit has carried over into adult life. I’m still trying to get an A on my own report card and I don’t want to cheat by asking for help.

Sure, in my work and in my church, I’ll readily contribute to a group project, but it never feels as natural to ask someone for help with something personal—like cleaning the garage. The dumb thing is I’ll think to invite a friend over for a visit, and we’ll hang out and talk while I do a few chores. But can you imagine how nice it would be if we worked on those chores together? We’d get them done in half the time, and my friend would feel like they were being truly useful to me.

Failing to plan is planning to fail

I used to think planners were boring. And even now, I can’t say planning comes naturally to me. I don’t get the same sense of satisfaction from producing a plan that my wife does. She’s a natural-born planner, and I’ve learned a lot by watching her at work.

My problem with planning has always been that I didn’t know how to do it. I would make these big, fofty plans that didn’t account for the realities of life. And I hardly ever broke bigger tasks into smaller ones because I wasn’t sure how long things would take, and I didn’t want to feel disappointed if things didn’t go according to plan.

But in the last year or two, I’ve finally transformed into a planner. I think my wife’s influence finally rubbed off on me, and my standards for what a plan should accomplish came down to a more human level.

Now, I draw up a rough outline for almost anything that’ll take more than 3-4 hours of my time over multiple days. Having a plan brings peace of mind, and I spend less mental energy trying to keep everything in my head.

Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life

Like all these other sayings, this one sounded a little naive to my younger self. There are no free lunches in life, I thought, and I was a bit suspicious of anyone who claimed there was a surefire way to make life easier.

So, I never really gave this advice a fair shake. I assumed work had to be hard (and even miserable at times), to be considered work. I assumed that was just one of the ways you got paid. You endured long stretches of boredom and unpleasantness and were compensated for your time.

And I suppose that may be true for some jobs, but not as many as you’d think. If you’ve been around the working world long enough, you’ll meet people of all kinds of personalities, and almost all of them will enjoy their work to some extent. They may be bored with it the longer they do it, but in the beginning, they saw it as a grand adventure.

The other day, I met a man who worked as a manager of the bagging department of a grocery store. He was the happiest man I’ve ever met and seemed to really enjoy his job.

Honestly, it caught me a bit off-guard to see someone derive that much pleasure from something I looked down upon. That lesson stayed with me, and I’ve come to realize that job satisfaction is far more subjective than we think, and it’s heavily influenced by the attitude you bring to work.

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop

I was a teenager in the early 2000s, just as broadband internet was spreading across the US. I didn’t have high-speed internet in my home, but the proliferation of smartphones and social media were still a few years away.

So I grew up with a somewhat analog childhood by today’s standards. I watched way too much TV, but I was generally an active kid, and the amount of time I had to be idle was limited by my parents.

In the 20 years since, we’ve had a full-scale revolution in entertainment and the availability of light-touch entertainment. Nearly every waking moment can be filled by scrolling a feed, listening to a podcast, or watching a show. And now, with the popularity of AirPods, you don’t even need to ask people to leave the room; you can just tune them out with a few taps on your phone.

It might be a bit old-fashioned to point this out, but we all know this wasn’t the future we were promised. Sure, people used to find ways to be idle before this, but you can’t tell me this 24/7 buffet of amusements hasn’t changed us.

We’ve become more passive, and the unintended side effect is that we’ve stopped making good things in our own lives. I’ve pulled back quite a bit in my own life, but I still have a ways to go. My advice is to be careful with your boredom; don’t scratch that itch immediately. You never know what creative endeavor might emerge if you force yourself to sit with it for a while.

Honesty is the best policy

I’d like to tell you that I learned this lesson from observing the poor choices in others, but the truth is I learned it from my own foolish teenage decision. Nobody ever thinks they’re going to get caught the first time they lie or try to cover up something. And largely, that’s true. You can get away with a lot on this earth by lying to other people and protecting your own reputation.

The only thing is you’re never guaranteed to get away with it. And when you’re inevitably caught, your reputation will be ruined for a long time. Why not come clean right away? Because it’s way easier to lie than to disappoint someone or take the punishment you deserve.

That’s an obvious answer, but it’s not an excuse. Those who are caught in their deception are brought low, not because they made a mistake (we all do), but because they are cowards in the face of their mistakes. That’s why I say it’s never too late to come clean. Even if you’ve been lying for a long time, the world will come to respect you for finally coming forward and admitting your guilt.

Too many cooks in the kitchen

We know that many hands make light work, but what about the other side of that problem? Sometimes there are too many hands, and not enough real work to go around.

The intuitive example is already built into the expression itself. If you’ve ever helped out in a busy kitchen, you know there is a point when more help actually becomes a burden because everyone is jockeying for space and trying to find something to do.

The takeaway is this: different problems call for different solutions. If you’re in the brainstorming or idea phase of a project, you want as many people as possible. You need the diversity of opinion and creativity to get things humming. But eventually, you need to scale down the help to a core group of doers. If you keep too many people on, you risk stalling things out in the bureaucratic stage of the process.