Ask HN: What is the best advice you got on any aspect of life?

"You are mistaken, your knowledge is partial, your certainty is a delusion, and real world consequences occur as a result. You desperately need to shut up. There are no exceptions."

You can test that advice here and now, first with your own apparent belief that advice can somehow be tested to be factually true, secondly by applying it to all of these comments.

Yes, I quoted myself.

Memento Mori

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

Long time ago a friend copied some albums onto minidisk for me.

When I played them I saw that he had named each album and track fully. This would have been done by manually choosing each letter using the arrow keys on the remote. It would have taken many hours to do this very tedious task.

When I expressed my amazement and thanks, he shrugged and said something that stuck with me ever since:

"If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well."

> if someone asks you to do something, especially in a social situation, tell them you will think about it

There's not a single socially capable person that will not straight away understand that "I will think about it" means "no".

May as well say no.

This is a mix of Buddhist, Hindu, and Stoic philosophy: Ask yourself this, why do you do anything? For the sake of Profit? Recognition? Love? Or return of any kind?

Any deed done with reward in mind creates an expectation which, if not met, causes suffering. Similarly, you will end up focusing more on the reward than the task itself and will unable to be loyal to the task. The only reason you must do a task is because you must do the task i.e. it's your duty to do so (either self-imposed or originating from a construct you follow).

This is such a conflicting piece of advice that goes against the fundamental reward-driven human biochemistry. But I've found that in following it, you really begin to tune out suffering and start to discover something that's a bit above being human.