Don’t have too much stuff.

Maintaining stuff takes time, so why have more than you need to? The more stuff you have, the more space you need. If you have two toilets, you have to clean two toilets. More stuff and more space means higher bills and more headaches.

Focus, but not entirely on large goals.

You can’t really make progress on too many goals at once, so it is better to choose a few (perhaps four) and focus on them. Having at least one of your goals at all times be small allows you to keep your mood up with a steady stream of small but significant achievement.

If you want to learn a skill, commit time to it.

When first playing the Sims, I thought to myself, “This is so unrealistic — my Sim is getting really good at playing guitar just from practicing all the time — wait a minute…”. Sure, we real people might not improve as reliably or steadily, but the general principal of “time spent leads to improvement” holds.

Try to find activities that serve multiple purposes.

We should maximize the limited time we have. Are there any activities you enjoy doing that could be shared with other people? Instead of practicing chess on your computer, make a chess buddy. If you do spinning at the gym and drive to work, why not bicycle to work instead?

I’m sure there are other lessons to be found, perhaps about the usefulness of routine or how you shouldn’t neglect any one area of life. What life lessons have you learned from The Sims?

By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one [for example turning to, say, altruism over intellectualization in times of trouble: read the article for more detail]. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.

A proposed cost saver for the Postal Service is for them to stop Saturday mail delivery. What if they took that idea further and allowed customers to receive physical mail electronically? I’m imagining an opt-in service where mail would be scanned every day and available to customers online. Then once a week the mail items that the customer hadn’t indicated should just be recycled would be delivered. Customers would also have the option of picking up recent mail in case they needed something sooner. This would allow customers to get their mail sooner and the post office to save on delivery costs.

I think this would ultimately cut down on “junk mail” because customers would not even accept delivery of those items and advertisers would realize this and mail less. The plan also opens up other possible revenue streams for the Postal Service, such as being able to charge mailers to get data on what percentage of customers chose to receive their items physically. (Hopefully we would consider privacy when developing such services.)

1. Sending me lots of mail
I can’t help but wonder how much of my, say, $50 donation goes toward postage, printing, and designing of mail telling me to donate more. That is not why I made my donation. And did you ever even ask me if I’d prefer snail or electronic mail? Sure, I know some overhead expenses are inevitable. but this one is very obvious to those outside the organization and bad for the environment too; if you’re going to waste money I gave you, don’t rub it in my and the trees’ faces. What I’d really like is a trustworthy online service that allows me to donate to organizations without them ever getting any of my contact info. Maybe something like that already exists…

2. Making it much easier to donate money rather than to volunteer
If I visit an organization’s website and there are big donate buttons or at least a section about donating, but nothing about how to volunteer, then I think less of the organization. What this says to me is that the organization in question is only really prepared to accept help if it is easy and on their terms, and that they are surely missing out on many chances to be better. Personally, I feel used when an organization just wants my money and not a relationship where we work together for some cause.

“If the lunch truly is free, the demand for free lunches will be large,” said Paul McCulley, a managing director with the investment firm Pimco.

One way to discourage people from getting bailed out unless it is truly necessary would be to make a rule something like this: if you request to be bailed out of your mortgage you will have a 50% chance of being randomly chosen to get aid. And if you aren’t chosen, you are not allowed to keep your home.
With a rule like this, there would be a strong incentive to avoid requesting help unless you truly cannot pay. I think this policy would help foreclosure rates as a whole and thus the economy, but would be bad and upsetting for some unlucky people. Perhaps there is a more realistic solution that involves the core idea of making requesting aid something you’d do only as a last resort.

…at least in terms of dates falling on the same days of the week.