Advice to Youth by Mark Twain "Advice to Youth" by Mark Twain is basically a short little composition that he was asked to write to the youth's of America.
Basically ity was just meant to be educational and useful in life. I think that what he said back then is just as true today as it was back when he wrote it. He starts off by saying that you should always listen to what your parents say even if you dont agree because if you try to rebel against them you'll just get into an argument and after being punished you'll be forved to do what they said anyway.It doesnt matter if you're right or not just listen to them; you'll save yourself the hassle of fighting with your parents and ruining your relationship with them. That's the advice that we've all heard, but find impossible to follow growing up.
It always ends up with ourselves being punished . He says that you should always respect your superiors whether they're strangers, family or friends.If someone does something to disrespect and your not sure whether it was intentional or not you should hit them with a brick and then if you find out that he didn't mean any harm you should be a man and tell the person you hit with the brick that you were the one who did it. He said that you shouldn't fight and just try to talk it out, let bygones be bygones.
The first half of this advice is correct; we should respect our elders even if they are wrong.As for hitting someone who offended you miss intentionally or otherwise, if we were to do this in today's society we would all have to carry weapons on us at all times and we'd all leave a trail of bodies everywhere we went. It's best just to ignore dumb remarks that are made by even dumber people and get on with life. There is too much ignorance in this world, one person won't be able to make a difference with something like this. In the third paragraph he says the old cliche "early to bed, early to rise".
Then he talks about getting up at different times and how whatever wakes you up will change your attitude.He trained a bird to wake him up at nine thirty every morning, so I guess it makes him optimistic to wake up to a lark chirping. I guess that's true, but in today's world no one gets enough sleep; everyone goes to bed late, wakes up early and is always tired. Alarm clocks are a pain to wake up to and so are radios. The sounds of nature wouldn't wake most people up because we have gotten used to loud noises, so low noise wouldn't make us shudder.
Most of us wake up to the buzzing or beeping of a blaring alarm clock, which makes us angry and groggy. We spend most of the morning dazed and confused and at night tired and lazy.He then talks about lying; he says that you refrain from lying as much as humanly possible unless you are skilled at it. If your a bad liar then you shouldn't lie because it will usually be slanderous and if you get caught spreading lies you'll be branded a liar by everyone.
This is obvious advice that most people have taken. Most people are good at lying because they have been practicing for years. To become successful you need to be able to lie and stick with the lie until you are on your deathbed. To hear a complete truth from anyone in today's world is almost impossible since we all stretch the truth from time.
