What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

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.

Recorded Marcus Mumford said elsewhere, not written here
Know the things you are responsible for and the things you aren’t.

The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 February 2026 source ↗

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Diana Athill Editor and memoirist
That this was true, I owe to Montaigne. I can’t remember when I read, or was told, that he considered it a good thing to spend a short time every day thinking about death, thus getting used to its inevitability and coming to understand that something inevitable is natural and can’t be too bad, but it was in my early teens, and it struck me as a sensible idea. Of course I didn’t set out to think about death in a regular way every day, but I did think about it quite often, and sure enough, it worked.
Recorded The Guardian, 23 September 2014 source ↗
Ahmed Zewail Chemist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1999
It was also evident to me that if you really want to achieve and do well in American society, you have to work, and work hard…You have to work, you have to work.
Recorded Heidi Aspaturian, Caltech Oral History Project, Caltech Archives Oral History Project, 2015 source ↗

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