Things I learnt that I wish people had told me sooner

Introduction

Have you ever had the experience of learning something new, something seemly basic and trivial, and realizing that everybody else had known all along and nobody had bothered to tell you? Have you ever asked why you were not told, only to be informed that it was "obvious"? There are many mechanisms through which young people are taught the obvious. But these are mostly social, through apprenticeships or employment. The internet lacks a similar mechanism. As a result, millions of people are every day rediscovering obvious truths, that should have been learnt years ago.

This is a bad state of things. The way a bad state of things persists is because nobody bothers to change it. When you've learnt something basic, you forget how it was to not know. You forget to write it down. You forget to share it.

Let's change this.

What if you could find a productive person, and instead of just sighing and saying "I wish I was like that", you could follow a link to their thingsilearnt.txt and see what they realized that you never did? What if people didn't have to rediscover every basic lesson on their own? How do you expect this to happen if you don't start?

Format

This file is UTF8-encoded Markdown (Markdown is easy to write and read in a plain text editor). If you want to get started, copy this introduction into your own file and link to it from your public profiles or signature. I recommend keeping the top line the same, everything else can - and should - be changed to suit your needs and preferences. However, it might be a good idea to stick with the basic layout so that people can eventually write programs to display these files. If you're on Linux, you can layout this file using a CGI script like this:

#!/bin/sh
# thingsilearnt.cgi
# using http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
echo 'Content-type: text/html'
echo ''
echo '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">'
echo '<html><head>'
echo '<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">'
echo '<title>Things I learnt that I wish people told me sooner</title>'
echo '</head><body>'
markdown.pl thingsilearnt.txt
echo '<sup><a href="thingsilearnt.txt">as text</a></sup>'
echo '</body></html>'

Important: if you use a similar script, don't forget to link to the text version at the bottom! That way, if people write reader programs they don't need to parse HTML.

Important: this file is not for things you wish others learnt. This file is for general advice that you wish you had learnt sooner. Don't feel obligated to fill it with everything you can think of. It's okay to have an empty file. Just have it around so you have a place to stick things as soon as you realize them. The point of this is to avoid advice that sounds helpful but either didn't matter much or really was obvious. By only writing down things that were novel to you and that you wish you'd learnt sooner, you (hopefully) raise the odds that it'll be novel to others and that they'll appreciate learning it.

Put the things you learn into a H1 section called "Content". (# Content) Make every thing you learnt a list entry (prefixed with "*"). For sub-entries or annotations, prefix the heading with " *" (that is "space asterisk"). If an entry is not trivially obvious, add links to explanations in sub-entries.

When you find a piece of advice that you want to try but are not sure about, add "(testing)" at the front. When you try a piece of advice and it doesn't work, add "(failed)" at the front.

When your file becomes too large, you can split it by topic. For this, use subsections (## Subtopic). I recommend against creating subsubsections.

This file is not for politics or philosophy. Please stick with advice that is immediately actionable. Actionable means that people can act on it.

"Don't keep dirty dishes wet, they will rot" is actionable.

"The world is an evil place, and everybody is out to get you" is not actionable.

PS: if somebody knows a way (css/js) to make these first two sections start out closed, and you can click on them to open them, please do so and document it in your Format section.

Thanks for your contribution!

Content

as text