What’s a life lesson given to you by an old person when you were young, that you regret that you used to live by until you realised that the world had already changed?

7 comments

1. always carry a quarter in case you need to make a phone call

2. I was told to be chivalrous

3. Walk in the business and ask for an application – nope they only accept online

   Call them to get an update on your application – they told me at the interview I’d be notified within 5 days and its been 2 hours

   Don’t sleep with wet hair or you’ll get sick – wtf does water have to do with my immune system grandma

4. None. They almost all later turned out to be right. I wish I had listened better to the stuff my mom and dad told me about relationships that I didn’t believe. I thought because their own relationship failed that I would do better than them. I thought that I knew better. It turns out I was brainwashed by our culture and Hollywood.

5. Basically anything my parents taught me

6. When I was in elementary school (1990s), it was mandatory for all students to write in cursive. If you didn’t write cursive, teachers literally made you rewrite a text. They told us it will be super important for our adult lives because it looks so much prettier/more elegant and employers will want to receive job applications written in cursive.

   Oh, and speaking of job applications. When we had to learn how to write job applications in Secondary School (7th-9th grade), we had to write everything by hand with our fountain pens. If we made a single mistake at the bottom of the page, we had to re-write the entire page. Because obviously, a CV, cover letter etc. has to look perfect. Our teacher insisted that writing job applications with a computer is an absolute no-go. She said: “If you write your job application with a computer, the employer will see how lazy you are and you’ll never receive a response.”

   That was 20 years ago. And to be fair, the vast majority of job applications back then were written by hand. But my teacher clearly didn’t see how fast times were changing. Nowadays, an employer would probably have a negative reaction toward a handwritten job application. How times have changed.

7. The lessons involving rapidly changing technology, tools, techniques changed and became less valid.

   The lessons involving things that haven’t changed are still 100% useful.

   Chief among those is dealing with people, who are no different now than they ever were. Trusting your gut, keeping your word, thinking it through from another’s perspective.

   Culture norms evolve, but not so much that *everything* old becomes useless.