how to never give a #@$! and a half about anything.

I’ll admit I’m not the most sharpened individual in the crayon box when it comes to talents. But I’ve really been practicing hard at this particular skill. They say that once you practice something for 10,000 hours, you become an expert at it. That means that you’d have to cultivate the equivalent of 417 days of practice to achieve expert status. Considering I’ve been training for this my whole life, I’d say I’m well-qualified to instruct others in this precise craft. I’ve developed the talent of becoming a duck and transforming everything that might potentially be a problem into water and consequently pouring it on my back. A few of the tips and tricks I used to completely stop giving a damn are outlined below.

1)      Decision making takes up a lot of time. I cut my decision-making processes down to a fourth of a second by simply replacing careful reasoning with a four-letter word preceding an ‘it.’ I find that it saves a lot of time and brainpower. And in the end, the decision still gets made! Try it.

2)      Recall that you will never see 90% of the people you met in high school again after you graduate. It thus becomes easy to disregard the people you feel need a bit of disregarding.

3)      If someone says something bad about you or to you, #2 is just as applicable. It helps to remember that one day after they and their loved ones die everyone will have already forgotten about them entirely. Their atoms will have gone off to make up something much cooler. This also applies to you, though, so maybe it’s not so useful after all.

4)      Go with your gut feeling. Advice is for cats.

5)      Remember the spotlight effect. Most people don’t pay as much attention as you think to both your successes and your failures. Even if you embarrass the hell out of yourself, chances are that most people will forget about it. Keep in mind that none of the people you embarrassed yourself in front of will be particularly relevant to you in a few years, anyway. And that your embarrassment really could have been quite worse.

Remember that damns are a form of fossil fuel. There are only so many damns left in the world. Save yours for a rainy day.