Two for me:

  1. The moment you feel tipsy it’s time to ease down. You have a stomach full of booze that’s going to make you more drunk even if you stop immediately.

  2. If you think people are good, you’re probably right and if you think people are bad, you’re probably right.

People are good IMO.

  • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1551·
    7 days ago

    I grew up in a racist town, and was indoctrinated on racism in my youth. It never sat right with me, but even so, I still struggled with racist thoughts that would jump in to my head when I encountered indigenous folk.

    Someone said to me though that it’s not the first thought that jumps in to your head that matters, because that’s what you’ve been trained to think. What matters is what you do after that thought has appeared.

    And that’s stuck with me. It helped me be aware of the impact of indoctrinated hate, whilst also not getting tied up with guilt over my inability to completely purge myself of the indoctrinated bullshit.

    It allowed me to retrain myself, and to make sure the shit I was raised with doesn’t get passed on to my own kid.

    • trashcan@sh.itjust.works
      36·
      7 days ago

      Thank you for sharing your perspective on this. I think we could heal if more people felt they could openly discuss how they grapple with it.

    • Andy@slrpnk.net
      25·
      7 days ago

      This is really deep.

      I also gotta say: I reserve more respect for anyone who changed their attitudes to something I admire than someone who always held them. Me? I’m pretty progressive. But it’s not like I can take credit. I share similar views to most people with my upbringing. Holding these beliefs is about impressive as a ball rolling down a hill.

      Questioning your beliefs and going somewhere else? That’s an achievement.

      • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        13·
        6 days ago

        To be clear, I’ve always been progressive. I was never overtly racist in the way so many of my peers were growing up. But their overt racism impacted me and filled me with assumptions and unchallenged beliefs that it took years to identify and challenge.

        I was born in Moree (the destination of the Freedom Ride (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Ride_(Australia)), and racism still shapes the town today. I don’t think it would be possible to grow up in that town without being shaped by racism in some way.

        • flubba86@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 days ago

          Wait… I thought the significantly higher than average percentage of Aboriginal people in Moree would cause the population to be less racist in general. Your experience implies that is not the case.

          • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
            71·
            6 days ago

            There’s diversity, where you have a lot of different types of people, and then there’s places with a high concentration of a minority group

            The first one makes people less bigoted, because you can’t avoid dealing with people when they’re everywhere. Your not going to last long in NYC if you don’t want your food touched by them. Either you deal with it and get used to it, or you’ll find it hard to eat

            The second one doesn’t force those normal human interactions. Instead, you have exposure. You see them around, but don’t have to treat them like people. You might not interact at all.

            So every time you see them, it reinforces the racism

            You see it all over the American South, people around the black communities aren’t less racist, they’re giga-racist

    • logos@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      5 days ago

      I couldn’t agree more. Trying to control your own first reactions to your environment is often like trying not to feel hot next to a fire. Totally futile and counterproductive. Control your behaviors and refine your beliefs.

    • Suck_on_my_Presence@lemmy.world
      11·
      7 days ago

      Those are words of wisdom that have always stuck with me too. The fact that your first thought can just be a hair trigger gross thing. But who you are is the reaction to that thought, and the actions you take then.

      I was raised by racists and generally not-good people and I learned from an early age to lie lie lie. So recently when a friend was offering me money for something, my trigger thought was to ask for a few hundred dollars more. And just. Gosh, ew, no, no, that’s awful. I still feel bad about the fact that my initial thought was that, but the reaction that follows are where my morals actually lie.

      Not an easy lesson to learn, but a very important one, IMO

  • SlippiHUD@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    5 days ago

    “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”

    This has helped me learn nearly every physical skill I know.

  • Smoogs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    5 days ago

    Maya Angelou: ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.’

  • Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca
    31·
    6 days ago

    Two TV quotes go through my head every day.

    Bill Nye: Everyone you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t.

    Doctor Who: Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind.

  • FBJimmy@lemmus.orgEnglish
    52·
    7 days ago

    More of a famous quote I guess, but:

    “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

    Since I first heard it, I’ve been far less annoyed / paranoid about other peoples actions, at work in particular.

    • niktemadur@lemmy.world
      7·
      6 days ago

      It seems my mind fine-tuned the phrase without me noticing it, for years I’ve thought of it as:
      "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity incompetence."

      It hits a little harder, I think, because incompetence should be vincible, a condition that can be overcome, implying that it’s a choice, a lazy indifferent choice, a mediocrity.

    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 days ago

      I try to live by a similar “always try to interpret peoples actions in the most positive possible way”. This means that if someone says something hurtful, they probably didn’t mean it, either something came out wrong or you misinterpreted them. Spend a couple seconds thinking about what they could have meant, and suddenly you’re choosing to interpret them in a way that makes your day better instead of worse.

      Same goes for actions. If someone does something you don’t like, you can very often choose to figure out what a good reason for their actions are. Trying my best to think like this has made me a lot happier and more easy-going.

  • Andy@slrpnk.net
    48·
    7 days ago

    Get ready, because this is kind of cheesy stuff, but these two pieces of sports advice, taken together, have guided me for years.

    First: a mentor of mine who was a pool shark taught me that when you’re playing pool, there is always a best shot to take. Sometimes, when you’ve got no good options in front of you you want to just do nothing or quit. But no matter what, billiards offers a finite set of options of where to try and aim the cue, and if you rank them from best to worst, there is always a best. When you’re in a bad situation, you find it and you take the best option. Often, that’s either a harm reduction strategy, a long-shot that feels impossible, or a combo of both. But if you always do this you’ll usually suffer far less harm in the aggregate, and if you take enough long shots you’ll occasionally achieve a few incredibly improbable wins.

    Second: A kayaking instructor taught me – and this I’m told is true in many similar sports – you go where your focus is, so to evade a problem, focus on the way past. If you see a rock, don’t stare it it, you’ll hit it. It doesn’t matter if your brain is thinking “I gotta go anywhere except that rock!” If you’re looking at, you’re heading into it. If you don’t want to hit the rock, instead you have to look at wherever it is you DO want to go. It takes a bit of practice, because your brain sees “rock!” more easily than “smooth water flowing between two rocks”. But that’s how you get down a river, and it’s also how you work through almost any other problems in life that are rushing at you: don’t focus ON them, focus on whatever is the preferred alternative. This is especially useful if the alternative is sort of a non-thing, like an empty gap between two problems. And it often is.

    Taken together, you get the basic approach that has steered my problem solving throughout adulthood. And it really works.

    • nikosey@lemmy.world
      17·
      7 days ago

      i took a motorcycle class where they also taught us that second one too: focus on where you want to go, not on what you want to avoid.

      i hadn’t considered it in a broader context until your post, but you’re right it works

    • Mr Fish@lemmy.world
      12·
      7 days ago

      I like that your first one doesn’t imply that you always need to find a good option, you only need to look for the best. Sometimes all of your options are bad, and in any other situation you’d never go for them.

    • Mike D@piefed.socialEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      I’ve played in pool leagues. The advice is solid. Go for your best shot. Sometimes that best shot is making sure the other person has no best shot either.

  • rice_nine@lemmy.world
    201·
    6 days ago

    When someone shows you who they are, believe it the first time.

    Also, if everyone you meet is nice, it’s because you’re a nice person. Conversely, if you think everyone’s an asshole, you’re the asshole.

    • khannie@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      Your second one ties right into my second one in the OP :)

      The first one, I have a rule: I don’t mind if you’re a cunt to me occasionally. We’re all a cunt occasionally. As long as you come back to me and apologise it shows me that you’ve considered your behaviour and who knows what caused it.

      If you don’t, I’ll cut you out of my life like the fat off a pork chop.

  • AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world
    9·
    5 days ago

    Paraphrasing from Terrence McKenna.

    “The one thing that seems constant through all the years is that… nothing lasts. Nothing lasts. Which is good news for some but will bum out others. Your happiness is slowly turning into something else, while your sadness will also become something else.”

  • gazter@aussie.zone
    39·
    7 days ago

    I work in an environment that can have some tight timeline, high stress moments. People often deal with this with a kind of controlled panic- “Hi. This thing is not working.” “Fuck, this is not working, quick, try that thing! Argh! Not working either! Oh no, shits fucked. Shit… Ok, try the other thing! Fuck, call Gary, they might know what to do!”

    Then I worked with a person who had this totally different approach. When shit hit the fan, they just super calmly looked around, and said “That’s a bit boring.” Just that phrase shifted my whole perspective on the industry. Just treat the problem as a minor annoyance, and you’ll see that it’s rarely worth getting panicked about.

    The other thing they taught me- no matter how urgent it is, never run. Running makes it look like we fucked up. And we don’t fuck up, we just have the next thing that needs to be fixed.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
      10·
      6 days ago

      no matter how urgent it is, never run. Running makes it look like we fucked up. And we don’t fuck up, we just have the next thing that needs to be fixed.

      Fake calm to be calm. Nice.

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
      5·
      6 days ago

      I get the approach here, but unfortunately, this is impressively hard to do without a (fiscal) safety net.

      I agree that it is wise to push out panic-inducing thoughts; mindfulness and all that. That’s not always possible when professional failure equates unemployment and the possible crippling poverty that follows. In my experience, employers do a garbage job at pointing out where the guardrails are, and what the bar is for dismissal, going as far as refusing to put anyone on a PIP before letting them go. Many people are in countless pressure-cookers like this, perpetually on the edge of their seats if they’re paying any attention at all.

      From all that I take this advice to boil down to: Practice mindfulness, ease, and inner-peace, especially when the shit hits the fan. You can’t control the consequences, but you’ll recover better if you keep your head.

    • theneverfox@pawb.socialEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      When shit hit the fan, they just super calmly looked around, and said “That’s a bit boring.”

      Yeah, that could go badly… If people think you’re not taking their emergency seriously, and it turns out it’s not a quick fix, they’re probably not going to be very happy

      I do find redirecting them calmly to be even more helpful. Just don’t let their panick infect you, and start working the problem normally

      That usually calms people down instantly, because it skips the part where they have to convince you there’s a problem, instead you just skipped to giving them what they actually want

  • silverlightBeing@lemmy.ml
    14·
    6 days ago

    “Stairs are lots of little floors which makes it easier to get between the bigger floors” - Philomena Cunk

    “The good things won’t be as good and the bad things won’t be as bad as the mind lead you to believe.” (Unknown source)