What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

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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 Brandi Carlile said elsewhere, not written here
Sacrifice the self and you will gain it. Serve the self and you will lose it.

The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 November 2025 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 ↗

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