This is advice my mother gave my son: If someone’s bullying you at school, you wait until their back is turned to you, then you hit them and run away!

My grandfather used to give his grandchildren a “pleasure dollar” that they weren’t allowed to spend on anything practical.

My grandmother would tell me one of these morsels of wisdom each day before I went to school for the majority of my childhood. 

1. Buy low, sell high.
2. Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes. 

After my grandma came over for dinner one night, we were all watching American Idol auditions. She turned to me halfway through and said, “Promise me you’ll never go on one of these reality shows. Those poor kids must be so embarrassed. Not to mention their parents.”

My younger brother was about to graduate college, and he’d just told our parents that he wanted to be a writer. When the extended family came to visit for graduation, the topic of careers came up at dinner, and our Pop Pop said to my brother, “You need to be realistic about money. I hear you like writing. Go to law school, become a lawyer, and you can write briefs.”  

When my grandmother saw me looking at a guy’s Facebook profile, she gave me this little gem. “You should stop spending time looking at boys on the computer. No woman ever found her husband on a computer.”