WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BY AGE 50

If you're 50 or older, you should know these things.

• It’s better to sing off key than not to sing at all.

• Promptness shows respect.

• You can’t avoid offending people from time to time. When you don’t mean it, apologize. When you do mean it, accept the consequences.

• Don’t be bothered when people don’t share your tastes in music, sports, literature, food and fashion. Be glad. You’d never get tickets to anything otherwise.

• Cough syrup doesn’t work.

• Keeping perspective is the greatest key to happiness. From a distance, even a bumpy road looks smooth.

• You can’t win arguing with police officers or referees, but every so often you can fight City Hall.

• Keeping an open mind is as big a challenge as you get older as keeping a consistent waistline.

• It’s never a shame when you admit you don’t know something, and often a shame when you assume that you do.

• Fear of failure is a ticket to mediocrity. If you’re not failing from time to time, you’re not pushing yourself. And if you’re not pushing yourself, you’re coasting.

• If you’re in a conversation and you’re not asking questions, then it’s not a conversation, it’s a monologue.

• In everyday life, most “talent” is simply hard work in disguise.

• When something that costs less than $200 breaks and it’s not under warranty and you can’t fix it yourself in half an hour, it’s almost certainly more cost-effective to throw it out.

• Mental illness is as real as diabetes, arthritis or any other disease, and no more disgraceful. It’s the stigma that’s disgraceful.

• All the stuff you have lying around that you’ll never want, need, wear or look at again? It just makes it harder to find what you do want, need or intend to wear. File it, donate it or throw it out.

• Exercise does not take time. Exercise creates time.

• The store-brand jelly, cereal, paper goods, baking supplies and pharmacy products are good enough.