The question
What lesson has mattered most in your life?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Be generous and kind. Honestly, those two things did everything for me.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 June 2025 source ↗
That there is no ideal life. Disappointments sit around every corner, so enjoy the here and now.
The world doesn’t consist of bad and good people; it consists of people seeing things in a different way.
To be led by love and not judgment.
To know thyself, as Shakespeare said.
That time I congratulated a waitress on being pregnant.
Intermittent laziness.
The metabolism I had in my 20s.
That I didn’t go to Turkey during the pandemic for one of those male hair treatments.
My first week in New York in 1978, when I was about to start as a writer at Time. And my first week in the south of France after retiring from my job of 25 years as editor of Vanity Fair.
Content. Cheerful. Appreciative.
Shaznay Lewis, Sofia Coppola, Derek Sivers, Ben Okri, Steve Jobs, Alex Hassell
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