I picked up Adulthood for Beginners: All the Life Secrets Nobody Bothered to Tell You, by Andy Boyle, on a whim, thinking it was just going to be a generic comedy book, and... to my surprise and amazement, it was awesome, funny, insightful... and actually lived up to its subtitle.
I mean, here are some of his opening assumptions:
I believe in some stuff that influences my thinking throughout this book. So you need to know where I'm coming from before we begin. Because all this shit is true. If you disagree, that's fine. But you're wrong.
1. Regardless of your past, you can always change yourself for the better.
2. Everyone makes mistakes and you shouldn't be supershitty to people because of it.
3. Most people are assholes before they turn twenty-five, so you should forgive them for most of their dumbness.
4. Privilege is a real thing and you should be aware of your own.
5. It's not cool to be a dick to people.
6. You should give a shit about everything you do.
7. You don't get to tell someone how they should look.
8. Your opinions don't matter more than anyone else's, regardless of how important you think you may be. Or even if you get a book deal and your name is Andy Boyle.
9. Life is a science experiment, so you should constantly be making and testing hypotheses.
10. Always work towards educating yourself further.
11. Treat people better than you wanted to be treated.
12. We're all going to die someday, so make this life matter.
I'm only halfway through at this point, but I keep wanting to underline every paragraph this far and write "YES, THIS" with a thousand exclamation marks in the margins, and I don't think that will change.
Also, I didn't know that the Sandra Day O'Connor and William Rehnquist went on a few dates in law school back in the day, before they went their separate ways and ended up on the Supreme Court together. Boyle uses that as an example of why you shouldn't ghost anyone: "Wouldn't it have been awkward if... they show up in their black robes and they gotta be, like, 'Oh, hey, sorry, I got busy and lost your number'"? LOL.
Frankly, if you collected all the positive posts on my tumblr dashboard in bound format, you'd end up something a hell of a lot like this book, which I think is just great.