“What They Forgot to Teach You at School” by The School of Life
- Leave your ‘inner school’, pursue your own meaning
- You don’t need permission
- No one cares: We are negligible in the wider scheme
- No one knows
- ‘The ordinary world in which we dwell is not divorced from the precinct of good ideas. … So-called geniuses don’t have thoughts different from those we have. They have just had the courage to stick by them, even when these thoughts happened not to chime with those of the majority.’
- ‘Our education system primes us to feel that the right thing to do – whenever we want to understand something – is to read what someone else had to say on the topic. … To really understand an issue, we may need to go not to the library, but out for a long walk or to take a long bath … to think our own thoughts.’
- Understand your childhood
- Love yourself: ‘To fail is the norm. We should stop feeling surprised that we do not lead the unblemished lives we cruelly assume it’s our responsibility to lead, when we possess so little of information about ourselves and the conditions of life.’ Also, everyone is a mess.
- Others are a lot like you: ‘On occasion, we should tread across the perceived gulf that separates us form the rest of humanity and simply guess that, probably, the other person is as bored as we are, or would quite like to have a laugh as much as we would. Or that they are as nervous as we have been – or as much in need of a friend.’
- Be kind
- Repair relationships
- Manage your moods
- Listen to the adult within
- Aim for emotional maturity: The capacity to explain (why we are upset), the capacity to stay calm (give others every benefit of the doubt), the capacity to be vulnerable
- Be more selfish
- Give up on people
- Choose a partner carefully
- Dating resilience
- There is always a Plan B: ‘Acknowledge that we are never cursed for having to make a Plan B. Plan As simply do not work out all the time.
- Time is short
- Be free: ‘We tend to fantasise about freedom in terms of not having to work or of being able to take off on long trips. If we dig into its core, though, freedom really means no longer being beholden to the expectations of others.’
- There is no destination
- Live light-heartedly: ‘True light-heartedness begins with an appreciation of one’s utter cosmic unimportance and nullity: nothing we have ever done, said or thought matters in any way.’
Kate Yeo 
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