Eight Rules of the School of Life

By Alain de Botton

1. Accept imperfection — We are all from close up scared, unsure, full of regret, longing, and error. No one is normal. The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
2. Friendship — Recognizing that we are each one of us weak mad and mistaken should inspire compassion for ourselves and generosity towards other people. Knowing how to reveal our vulnerability and brokenness is the bedrock of true friendship, which we universally crave. Tragedy may strike anyone at anytime. We should be slower to judge and quicker to understand. Be kind.
3. Know your insanity — We cannot be entirely sane, but it is a basic requirement of maturity that we understand the ways in which we are insane, we can warn others we care about our insanities might make us do, early and in good time and before we have caused too much damage. No one has yet had a normal childhood.
4. Accept your idiocies — Do not run away from the thought you may be an idiot as if this were a rare and dreadful insight. Accept the certainty with good grace in full daylight. You are an idiot but there is no other alternative for a human being. We are on a planet of 8 billion comparable fools. Embracing our idiocy should render us confident before challenges because messing up is to be expected, it should make us comfortable with ourselves, and ready to extend a hand of friendship to our similar broken and demented neighbors. We should overcome shame and shyness because we have already shed so much of our pride.
5. Good enough — The alternative to perfection isn’t a failure, it’s to make our peace with the idea that we are, each of us, “good enough”. Good enough parents, siblings, workers, and humans. Ordinary is not a name for failure. Understood more carefully and seen with a more generous and perceptive eye, it contains the best of life. Life is not elsewhere; it is fully and properly here and now.
6. Beyond romanticism — The one is a cruel invention. No one is ever wholly right nor indeed wholly wrong. True love isn’t merely admiration for strength, it is patience and compassion for our mutual weaknesses. love is a capacity to bring imagination to bear on a person’s less impressive moments — and to bestow an ongoing degree of forgiveness for natural fragility. No one should be expected to “love us just as we are”. Genuine love involves two people helping each other to become the best version of themselves. Compatibility isn’t a prerequisite for love; it is the achievement of love.
7. Cheerful despair — We are under undue and unfair pressure to smile. But almost nothing will go entirely well. We can expect frustrations, misunderstanding, misfortune, and rebuffs. We should be allowed to be melancholy. Melancholy is not rage or bitterness, it is a noble species of sadness that arises when we are open to the fact that disappointment is at the heart of human experience. In our melancholy state we can understand without fury or sentimentality that no one fully understands anyone else, that loneliness is universal, and that every life has its full measure of sorrow. But though there is a vast amount to feel sad about, we are not individually cursed and against the backdrop of darkness many small sweet things should stand out: a sunny day, a drifting cloud, dawn and dusk, a tender look. Despair but do so cheerfully, believe in cheerful despair.
8. Transcend yourself — We are not at the center of anything, thankfully. we are minuscule bundles of evanescent matter on an infinitesimal corner of a boundless universe. We don’t count one bit in the grander scheme that should be a liberation. We should gain relief from the thought of the kindly indifference of spatial infinity, an eternity where no one will notice and where the wind erodes the rocks in the space between the stars. Cosmic humility — taught to us by nature, history, and the sky above us — is a blessing and a constant alternative to a life of frantic jostling, humorlessness and anxious pride.
9. Final point – In theory, we know all about it and yet in practice any such ideas have a notoriously weak ability to motivate our actual behavior and emotions. Our best knowledge is both embedded within us and yet it is ineffective for us. We forget almost everything. Nothing really sticks. For this reason, we need to go back over things, maybe once a day, certainly once a week.
10. A true good school shouldn’t tell us only things we have never heard before, it would be deeply interested in rehearsing all that is theoretically known yet practically forgotten.