I have been writing software for a long time. I have learned a lot in that endeavor that I realized applied to life in general. Maybe this will be of interest to someone.

• Just because something’s logical doesn’t mean it’s right or true. For any given amount of information, there are typically a number of possible explanations that make sense. But only one is actually true.
• The more information you get, the closer you get to the truth. Diving deeper into something helps you to narrow the number of possibilities, refining your understanding.
• Don’t trust your first instinct about what something is or means. Sometimes your first thought is right – you get lucky sometimes. But if you assume your first, uninformed opinion is the right one, it can prevent you from seeing what the truth actually is.
• “Good” and “bad” are always subjective. Even when your metric is objective, the assignment of that metric to “good” or “bad” is subjective. It’s better to talk about the metrics themselves. Or just not get into it to begin with.
• The larger the system, the more chaos creeps in. Breaking things down into small pieces that work doesn’t mean the larger thing will work. You have layers built on top of layers. Complex things are chaotic by nature. And people are inherently complex.
• You can spend weeks or months planning only to have to modify or throw away your plans as soon as you make your first connection to something real. What you think is going to work might not be what actually will work. Sometimes it’s better to make some explorations, to confirm or discover what is actually real.
• Imagination is a poor substitute for reality. I have learned to doubt, on at least some level, my first impression of anything. If you want to know what is really going on, you have to get out of your head.
• Documentation is a poor substitute for reality. Just because someone wrote something down doesn’t mean it’s true.
• Things aren’t always going to be fun. Sometimes you have to do things just because you have to do them. That’s just life.
• Things aren’t always going to be easy. There will be challenges you never could have imagined. It’s in the facing of those challenges that we learn about ourselves and grow.
• Don’t give up right away. Persistence can pay off. Sometimes the difference between success and failure is the fact that you didn’t stop trying.
• Sometimes the best approach to a problem is to stop, back up, and look at it from a different point of view. It’s easy to get stuck in what you perceive is “the right approach”. But that could just be you running into the same wall over and over again.
• Sometimes, the best approach to a problem is to talk to someone else. Talking out a problem can help you gain insight. And sometimes the other person just happens to know the answer – they have gone through what you have gone through.
• Nobody can do everything. You get really good results from a group of people with different skill sets all working together. Every person can play a part, based on what they bring to the party. The trick to having things go well is to look at what people can do, not what you think they should do.
• Communication is a dark art. No matter how much you might like to think that you’re being obvious and clear, the proof is in whether someone else actually thinks so as well. And if they don’t understand you, it’s not necessarily their fault… or yours. Communication is an interactive, two-way street. And people can differ even about what individual words actually mean, sometimes on subtle levels. To be effective, you have to listen as much as speak.
• What matters is what a person does, not what a person is. Titles and status mean nothing, at the end of the day. Anyone can contribute. Anyone can create something amazing and worthwhile. Anyone can change the world.