A Quote from David Cook's Blog

I used to believe life got better as you got older, but now I realize this is untrue. I could mention to them that high school mediocrity is no impediment to leading a happy life. I was an extraordinarily mediocre student. I did not graduate in the top third of my high school class. I submitted nine pieces to my high school literary magazine during the course of my years there and they were all rightly rejected. But I don’t think this message would go over well with the current faculty, or with the younger brothers and sisters in the audience — or at least their parents.

At the moment, I’m thinking of talking about the chief way our society is messed up. That is to say, it is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.

The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.

The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.

The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.