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36 Pieces of Advice (Good or Bad) for my 36th Birthday

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Background #

I am turning 36. I am thinking about my 2023 New Year’s theme1: Arrivals

2023 is a year of Arrivals. New year, new you, you know?

When you arrive somewhere, into a new city, a new job, a new mindset, people often have advice for you. Some of it is good, some of it less so. Some is immediately applicable and some of it you will only really appreciate years down the road.

Arriving means reaching a place at the end of a journey. But, often, the arrival is just the beginning of the next stage in a journey. This reflection leads me to my request for my 36th birthday. So, what’s your best (or worst) piece of advice?

For my 36th birthday (June 5th), please share a piece of advice, good or bad.

It might be a great piece of advice that you’ve been given that has led you through the world. It might be a piece of bad advice that you got years ago and is still rattling around in your mind.

If you are in need of inspiration, I’d strongly recommend taking a minute to read Mary Schmich’s 1997 Chicago Tribune column: Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young, which was quickly remixed by Baz Luhrmann in the song Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen), or colloquially The Sunscreen Song.

Submission #

Please send me a piece of good, or bad, advice. If you’d like, please share a little bit about why you chose this piece of advice to share, I’d love to collect all of these pieces of advice together to stitch them into a Top Tip Tapestry.

You can email it to me, or post it and share on Twitter.

Previous Birthdays #

As with each year prior, the goal is to collect one for every year I have lived, this year that would be 36.

Over the past years I have asked for some interesting collective creation gifts for my birthday:

  1. Try themes instead of New Year’s Resolutions. They carry less baggage. For example, at the start of each year I define a thematic resolution to colour the year. It is through this thematic lens that I look at events of the year. ↩︎

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