The Most Important Life Lessons You Didn't Learn In School

For most of my life, I did well in school classrooms, from kindergarten all the way to graduate school, from cursive all the way to stochastic financial modeling. However, since I left academia, I was in for a real treat because very little of my schooling had much carryover to real life. Being able to solve Schrödinger's equation for a delta potential doesn't help you reduce your bodyfat percentage, and even knowing how to use Lagrange multipliers to derive the demand curve of a Cobb-Douglas utility function with a budget constraint won't help you manage your personal finances. I had to learn again with life as my new instructor. But the most life important lesson has been finding happiness which is what I would like to discuss.

Let's start with dealing with failure. What does it really mean to fail in life? A very simple way to define success and failure is to determine your annual salary. If you are below the poverty line ($11,770), you have certainly failed. If you are in the top one percent of income-earners ($400,000+), you have certainly succeeded. But this is not true. There certainly are vagabonds who are quite happy and multimillionaires who are absolutely miserable. Yet, we all think that more wealth will lead to more happiness because of what they can purchase and how they will be admired by others. But the
truth is that there is no end to that. If you live long enough, you will know many people who are financially well-off who are deeply unhappy, more unhappy than others who make significantly less than they do. I certainly can name a few.

The one most important thing that drives life is the pursuit of happiness. But how do we actually attain true, lasting happiness? I did not learn this in school, and I only learned parts of it from my family. As much as I love my family, I would be lying if I said that I learned everything about how to be happy from them. The harsh truth is that, ultimately, you pave your own path to happiness or else you will never get there. You have to take responsibility for your own well-being and contentment, and that is probably the best advice I can give about living life fully and with purpose.

I will say that there are tools that have helped me and many others in our common quest for self-actualization. Hands down, the best happiness hack I have is being able to maintain good physical health. Almost always, my physical condition affects my emotional well-being. Even if I experience some psychological disturbance, I can really fine tune my physical state with good diet, exercise, sleep, and sun exposure to offset the psychic distress.

Another great tool is spending more time doing things you really enjoy. If you haven't found something you really enjoy, then don't give up until you find it. Explore, try different things, and eventually, you will find it. Believe me when I say that it will be well worth the search. For me, it has been improvisational theater. Signing up for my first improv class at The Upright Citizens Brigade Theater was probably one of the biggest milestones in my life, possibly one of the best decisions I ever made. When you immerse yourself into a passion, the passion will teach you more about yourself and life in general. And when you're really in the moment, you may experience instances of intense focus and creative flow. That brings us to my last bit of advice.

People may debate about this next recommendation, but it has worked for me which is why I will mention it. My third and last happiness tool is studying and practicing spirituality. I could have called it philosophy or religion, but I am not too concerned about the labeling as much as I am about the concepts that have influenced me. I believe that EVERYONE has her or his own "religion" or "philosophy". You may say you're a Roman Catholic, but you probably have your own unique beliefs about God and your relationship with Him (which makes you a heretic, but fortunately, no one cares these days). By your own "religion" or "philosophy", I mean your own core values about how to live with all the other living things around you. They will help you find and support your purpose in life. I often go through phases of learning about different religions (e.g. Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism) and will incorporate teachings and practices that I find valuable into my own life. I used to pray to God regularly, but now, I prefer meditation and practice gratitude. I try to live simply, suppress materialism, and help others. I remind myself of my own mortality, which helps me cherish the little time I have on Earth.

Actually, I came up with one more lesson as I am writing this post: relationships. I can't deny how important your relationships are, especially the ones with your family. The older I get, the more I appreciate my parents. Whenever people ask if I am lucky, I say, "Yes," because I was fortunate enough to have loving parents who raised me. No amount of money can change that fact. I didn't learn every important thing about life from them, but they did show me what love is, and maybe love is all you really need.