Seventeen Life-learnings from The author of The Marginalian

From one of my most enjoyable newsletters, "The Marginalian" - as it hits another anniversary. Maria Popova states:

Seven years into this labor of love, which had by then become my life and livelihood, I decided to set down some of the most important things I learned about living in the course of writing this personal record of reckoning with our search for meaning. Every year in the decade since, I have added one new learning and changed none of the previous. (It can only be so — a person is less like a star, whose very chemistry, the source of its light, changes profoundly over its life-cycle, and more like a planet, like this planet, whose landscape changes over the ages but is always shaped by the geologic strata layered beneath, encoding everything the planet has been since its birth.)

For brevity sake, I'm just going to give the first sentence of each of her "important things she learning about living." You can go to her site to see the full extent of them.

17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian

 1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. 

2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. 

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. 

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life.

5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. 

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.

7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” 

8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. 

9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. 

10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively.

11. A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.

12. There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.

13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. 

14. Choose joy. 

15. Outgrow yourself.

16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.

17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.