Alberto García 🚀🚀🚀

Non-bullshit advice to survive a hard life.

I’ll get right to the point.

I will share 31 bitter lessons that the sooner you learn in Life, the better off you will be.

I do because I wish someone had shared them with me in my 20s — they would have saved me a lot of pain, disappointment, and suffering.

Let’s start

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1. It hurts people more to lose property than to lose a loved one. My family suffered more at the notary’s office than on my grandfather’s funeral day. — It’s Dantesque to see how your aunts-in-law ransack your grandfather’s house while your grandmother mourns the death of her husband. It is like watching pigeons pecking at the remains of the sandwich that fell to the ground and left the rats.
2. The music in fashion is in style because it incites you to consumption: think of the summer song and the Christmas remixes; where do they always sound? In the stores, in the restaurants, in the bars, what for? So that YOU SPEND YOUR MONEY. — And Christmas carols are used to make you relate Christmas with BUYING presents.
3. There’s a time in Life when you’re excited about what’s new. And you’ll be excited waiting for the latest Smartphone or Airpods, but then there will be another time when the opposite happens (It started happening to me in my 30s). To quote Norah Ephron, “I became a big advocate of Blogs and email. Instead, I feel like everything new has been brought into the world to make me feel bad.”
4. When you work for a company and fire you, they will do it at the end of the work day to monetize your last day. In the multinationals I have worked for, they used to do it on Fridays. Significant changes, salary cuts, bonuses, commissions, incentives, and other bad news in August. They take advantage of the fact that people are on vacation in the summer and complain less.
5. When you have real fear or anxiety, there comes the point when you laugh because laughter is a defense mechanism. It is the way you will have to cope with an unsustainable situation.
6. You can fall in love with an illusion. And then you may want to deceive yourself to continue feeling that love no matter how much suffering it entails. That’s why you have to be careful with internet romances. If you fall in love with the wrong person, you will start to self-deceive yourself and continue with a long-distance relationship that will never physically become a reality (that’s how I have spent a few years playing the fool).
7. Experience can be an advantage but also a burden in this technologized and changing world so fluid that things that used to take decades to become obsolescent now do so in months. It is better to have adaptability to the environment and little attachment to the obsolete knowledge that we usually call experience.
8. If no one but you makes money from your writing (or your art), forget about getting on the bestseller list. The writer is the most visible part of a work chain comprising editors, publicists, producers, publishers, agents, and bookstores. They all want their share of your cake, and if they don’t get it with you, they will look for someone else, even if you are the new Hemingway.
9. I once sold an apartment to an emergency helicopter pilot in Madrid, and he confessed to me that there were hospitals that had a higher survival rate than others for the same type of emergency. The moral of the story: If you buy a house, check the survival statistics of hospitals and move near the best hospital because that will increase your chances of survival if, for example, you have a heart attack.
10. I once asked my grandmother why she went to the hairdresser every day if she had short hair. She told me that it was cheaper than going to therapy. Since then, when I feel distressed, I go down to the barbershop and ask for an old-school shave. And when they towel me down with hot water to soothe my freshly shaved face, it’s like I’ve taken Prozac. It works.
11. You are what you’re reading and what you’ve read. You are all the videos you consume and the photos you see. You are the music you listen to. That’s why it’s important to filter what comes through your senses into your brain. There is audiovisual and written material that enters and leaves your mind. Still, some images or texts stay and end up living their own Life in the darkest and inaccessible part of your consciousness (I can’t get out of my head specific images from Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange).
12. It doesn’t matter if they speak well or badly; the important thing is that they talk. My grandfather always told me that, and it’s true. Attention is the new petroleum in today’s age.
13. When the absence of your favorite food puts you in a bad mood, it is because it is not only your favorite food but an addiction (carbohydrates, in my case).
14. Don’t chase easy money, but neither chase hard money. When you have a toxic client, evaluate the time it takes you to satisfy his ego and demand, and you will see that no matter how much he pays you, you are not compensated for the payment. Raise the price of your services until you are compensated or break your business relationship with him (I choose the second one because I live happier).
15. Please don’t take things for granted because when you trust them, they disappear—InJoan Dideon’s words (after her husband’s sudden death), “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner, and the Life you know is over.”
16. I once sold an apartment to a famous Italian opera director, and when he showed me his documentation, I couldn’t believe he was 70 years old and looked 40. I asked him for his secret, and he told me, “Sunscreen even in winter and at night a moisturizer. It only works if you are consistent throughout Life.”
17. When you have the money to do all those things you can’t do today — the AC/DC concert, the backpacking trip in Europe, working as a digital nomad in Costa Rica — you won’t have the desire. So if you have the passion, do yourself a favor and fulfill those dreams because later in life, even if you force yourself to meet them, it’s not the same, and you won’t enjoy them.
18. Over the years, you will not need to seduce anyone. You will know how to interpret the secret language of looks, “I’m not in the mood,” “You’re not my type,” “Okay, but something casual. Don’t fall in love”, “I’ve been alone for a long time, don’t hurt me.” You will also discover that adults know how to speak this language and distrust those who have not yet learned it.
19. When you suffer a lot in a relationship, it is probably not love but nostalgia for what once was the relationship + Stockholm syndrome.
20. If you are young and healthy, you already have everything you need. When you get older, you want success, recognition, and money to have what you have naturally today: youth, beauty, health, and desire. You are richer than you think.
21. Most of your daily reproaches to your loved ones come from wanting them to behave how you think they should. To cancel out the other always leads to conflict. It is much better and less conflictual to accept others as they are.
22. Life can be a bad joke, but it is a joke nonetheless. And as dreadful as it can be, you can look back and laugh at some point. The trick to this is that by telling what happened to you and what you overcame, you’ll stop being the victim and become the hero.
23. Don’t obsess about being too bright; focus on making the right decision at least 51% of the time. That one percent is your edge in the casino of life.
24. There is nothing free on the Internet. If you don’t pay for it with money, you pay for it with attention. Your attention is then converted into sales (money), opinion (influence), or votes (power). Remember this every time you spend too much time on the screen.
25. The level of daily irascibility is inversely proportional to the level of mental clarity. And mental clarity is directly proportional to a happy life. Conclusion: Want to improve your Life? Focus on being less reactive.
26. When you defend an opinion on an issue that does not directly concern you as if it were something against you, the media probably have parasitized you, and they have polarized you and made you part of the herd.
27. Dam Brown says that when you write a novel, the first thing to do is write the enemy because that defines the central character. In life, it is the same. Choose your enemies wisely. Because they are a fundamental part of your identity, in particular, what you are not (which defines who you are).
28. When you realize you have less life left to live than the years you lived, the days change entirely. You don’t steal a day from me. Because I have fewer and fewer left, and therefore they are worth more.
29. As you age, instead of thinking about what you want to accomplish, you prioritize what you want to let go: habits, dreams, behaviors, beliefs, etc.
30. When you get past forty, not only do you discover your self-deceptions more quickly, but you see the real motivations that lead you to want to self-deception, and they are not the reasons you thought you were doing things. It’s a crazy thing.
31. It’s not fear that holds you back; it’s the poor mentality that makes you waste your life chasing small dreams and not wanting to spend money without realizing that you’re not spending it; you are investing it.

A virtual hug

AG