If you see someone photographing a group, offer to take the photo for them so they can get in the picture. Please do not steal their camera.

Related: please do not eat your fans. They are not actually cake.

In any large retail store, choose the line that’s mostly young people who are by themselves.

IKEA's blue *FRAKTA* shopping bags are one of life's low-key power tools. They fold ridiculously small, so they can live unobtrusively in places like automobiles or even other bags, like suitcases. Because, some day you may suddenly wish you had *freaking nineteen gallons* of extra bag with you.

Relatedly related: but, yeah, maybe still almost never say anything about how someone looks ever.

Piles can be a quick and dirty way to tidy an area or organize a bunch of stuff. But, temporary piles tend to devolve into permanent piles, and permanent piles are struggling to warn that you are becoming neither tidy nor organized.

Avoid using your hand as a tool. Almost always prefer to use your hand to *manipulate* an appropriate tool. You're going to need your hand for other things.

Try always to store something in the first place you just looked for it. Not "where it's pretty" or "where we used to keep it" or "where we have more room." It goes *where it goes*—not where you **think** it goes.

Related: Just because an area temporarily has nothing in it does not mean it can be instantly reclaimed for other things. Especially if it's the area in the fridge where only Daddy's seltzer goes. Because nothing else *ever* goes there even when there's "nothing" there.

In the world of independently making stuff, success with an audience can be thought of as a slice of cake that is impossibly slim but improbably deep. Stay focused on delighting the right tiny wedge of the best baked good you can make and there's potentially no limit to how tall it can get.