Only break one law at a time.

For example; If you have an AI executive tied up in the trunk of your car, make sure the tail lights all work.

"Never let perfect get in the way of good enough."

If you wait on the "perfect" time to do something, or the "perfect" opportunity, you may find it never comes. Make the most of what's in front of you.

If not me, then who? If not now, then when?

...as an adult, you realize that much of the time, no one is going to come save you.

Haven't seen it yet.

You can make no mistakes and still lose. That is not failure, that is life. -Picard

Got this one from a fortune cookie. What can I say, if it's good it's good.

"Friends are those who, when you've made a fool of yourself, don't think you've done a permanent job of it."

I have several that I live my life by. Being prompted has caused me to forget all of them

people don’t remember what you say or do nearly as much as they remember the way that you make them feel.

It is only when a mosquito lands on your testicles that you realize there is a way to solve problems without using violence.

"You do not treat a man like a gentleman because he is. You treat a man like a gentleman because you are."

"I've always enjoyed an advantage over people who don't read the instructions." -My Dad.

Folks, life doesn't always come with instructions, but when it does... read them.

"The graveyard is filled with people who had the right of way"

A few from the file I keep:

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. - Jan van de Snepscheut

I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned. - Richard Feynman

Give a man a mask and he'll show you his true face. - Oscar Wilde (paraphrased)

You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. - C.S. Lewis

Magic is science you can’t explain. Science is magic you can. - My Daughter

You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago. - Alan Watts

What you do to achieve your goals must never become more important than the goals themselves. - Anonymous

Buy a plunger before you need a plunger

And

Win small, lose small

This last one I heard applied to backing up a trailer, but it works in many corners of life.

In short: Don't worry about it.

In long: If you have a problem, you can either do something about it or you can't. If you can do something about it, do that thing instead of worrying. If you can't, worrying just gives you an additional problem.

We think we are approaching death gradually, and will die one day. That's not true. We are dying every single day, every single minute. The time in our life that has already passed, now belongs to death.... It's not that our life is short, it's just that we waste a lot of it.... We may leave this life this very moment, let that decide how we will go about with our stuff today.

• Seneca / Marcus Aurelius

It doesn't TAKE all kinds, we just HAVE all kinds.

Nature bats last.

The earth isn't dying, it is being killed, and those killing it have names and addresses.

There's a saying in Chinese. It rhymes in Chinese (which makes it so much cooler) but the translated version is this:

Given equivalent units of gold and time, it is easy to trade time for gold, but it is challenging to trade gold for time.

Essentially, be wary of how much you're devoting to your work, because it doesn't matter how successful you are, you will never get your life back

There's another one that I find to be very relevant with the times:

a boat with naturally straighten itself when it nears a bridge

It's a descriptivist version of the English saying "we'll cross that bridge when we get there." Essentially, problems have a way of sorting themselves out when things get desperate enough

This.

"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly"

When you have a task, no matter what it is, it doesn't actually matter too much if you do a good job or a bad job. What's important is that you do a job. Don't give up on something because it isn't perfect or because you don't have all the answers; just do it anyways. It doesn't matter if it's shitty or if it's incomplete, it's still infinitely better than doing nothing at all.

Perfection is the enemy of progress

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." — George Bernard Shaw

The days are long but the years are short.

Here's a few that stuck with me over the years:

"A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle." --Jeff VanderMeer

"Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." --Gustav Mahler

"If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy." - - Sir Terry Pratchett

From my ex-father-in-law

Trust not what the snake will do, but what it can do.

This comes to mind while driving

A bad driver never misses their turn

Finally, my daily motivator (on my lock screen)

This too shall pass

Never push a glacier

Never agree to do something next week you wouldn't do now

"The enemy of good is perfect."

Endlessly chasing perfect can destroy something that was already good.

• Brush your teeth.

• No.

• The most dangerous minority are the Rich.

If someone is unfairly criticizing someone or a group of people it is only because they feel inadequate in some way.

Don't let school get in the way of your education

You have to do something poorly before you can do it well.

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” - Douglas Adams

Ignore negative people, they have a problem for every solution. When the wind changes, some will build walls, others build windmills. When God created man, she was only joking.

never carry what you can roll, never roll what you can leave.

back saving advice from an old stagehand.

your amygdala is stupid and always faster than your frontal cortex

"Nothing good lasts, nothing bad lasts. The only constant is change."

"I don't know" is a valid scientific statement and (hopefully) the beginning of wisdom

*If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging"

If you find yourself in a bad place, don't make it worse.

I can tell you one that is super applicable to the current era:

Garbage in, garbage out.

It's a 1980s programmer's adage in response to the belief by business owners that computers could solve their problems without data, or with limited data, or with inaccurate data.

Cut to the era of LLMs in which we're asking glorified autocomplete to answer deep, philosophical or religious questions, or complicated political questions or complex logical dilemmas, when they were trained on Reddit and 4Chan.

There's a 1970s corollary;

The computer is always right.

This is from the tendency of clerks and bureaucrats to, when confronted with conflicts between reality and the data fields in a computer database, favor what the magic box says.

Again, we're seeing magical box thinking in the present day.

Oh, I thought of another, which I’ve said to my kid hundreds of times over the years:

‘It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it’, typically with things like an umbrella or water.

"Comparison is the thief of joy."

"Life happens where ever you are" "pide is not the opposite of shame, but it's source"