1. Self-awareness is the lubricant to all social friction. If you can see yourself the way others truly see you, you are well on your way to getting along with others. In seeing yourself for what you are, you can laugh at yourself. If you can laugh at yourself, you will avoid so much anger or insult. You will bond, team up, work with, and get along so much better with others.
2. You are a bundle of biases that filter and skew all that comes to you. No opinion you shape, no decision you make will be free of those biases. Yet knowing this to be so will liberate you to make better decisions. Make all decisions in a second language (proven to overcome many biases).
3. Right here, right now. Mindfulness extends life infinitely. If you can appreciate this moment rather than mourn the lost ones or yearn for the yet unlived ones, you can relax into a rewarding calm.
4. Seek out opposites. You will bond with those most like you whether you admit it or not. The human propensity toward homophily is too strong to easily overcome. You must work hard to really spend time with those who see the world differently from you, and it will make you uncomfortable. But it will enrich you.
5. Travel. Travel more. Travel will flush all the routine pattern recognition away that puts your brain on autopilot. You will feel more alive, more attentive and more curious.
6. Help someone die. Merely being with someone at the very end of their life, sitting with them, talking or even comforting them in silence will take away the scariness and mystery of death so you can live more.
7. Do something scary. Once you have done it and survived, you will be thrilled and more confident than ever. You will inflame parts of your brain that had been dormant. You will dream about it later and smile to yourself at odd moments. You will know nothing is that big a deal and calm yourself when mundanities numb you.
8. If you cannot picture your life partner making you laugh 50 years from now, bail out. Humor rekindles love and warmth. Humor brings you back to earth and humbles you. Humor depends on insights and timing, something hugely important in truly intimate relationships. Not just wit, but humor that depends on understanding you, your tastes, your psyche. Life can become very tough and your body will surely degenerate. Humor looks past all of that and heals with resilience.
9. Everything and everyone is interesting under a microscope.
Look at a fly, a leaf, a hair--they take on beautiful or horror movie aspects. Do the same with any human being, no matter how boring you thought they might be and you will eventually dig to their hidden level of fascination. All it takes is curious listening and an appetite for questioning. You will be rewarded with the surprise that everyone is weird, horrifying, lovely, talented or fascinating at some power of magnification.
10. Learn to read & write. No other creature can write stories, memoirs, history, arguments, poetry. I am sure a primate can learn to make a video, but will never write a villanelle. Our minds evolved to be simulators that can reenact what we read and transport us, and even change us. Writing forces contemplation.