3 things: My go-to record store from my college days, thinking marginally for a better life, and the guy who ruined his life by opening a restaurant

Soon after starting my colorful academic career at Crazy Go Nuts University (a.k.a. Queen’s University) in Kingston, Ontario in 1987, Brian’s Record Option — an ever-chaotic shambles of a record/CD/tape shop — ended up being one of my regular go-to places. I would’ve figured that Brian would’ve retired and closed the shop already, but it turns out that he’s still there, running the business (and I’m using the terms “running” and “business” very loosely). Read more about one of the hangouts of my wonderfully misspent youth in this Noisey article, Brian Lipsin Is Kingston, Ontario’s Anarchist Record Shop Owner.

From Improve your life by thinking marginally:

“Try to answer the following two questions as honestly as you can:

• If you found yourself with an extra hour a week of free time – what would you do more of?
• And if you found yourself with an hour a week less of free time – what would you do less of?

If your answers to these questions differ, then you’re not doing a good job managing your life, and you should just go ahead and replace things from your second answer with things from your first answer.”

What happens when you think that all you need to excel at something is passion, and you skip the other prerequisites such as skills, knowledge, experience, good fortune, and perhaps a modicum of common sense? You get stories like Toronto foodie turned failed restaurateur Robert Maxwell’s A Restaurant Ruined My Life. It’s the latest in a series of Toronto Life articles written by people with more money than brains who are also hard to sympathize with (such as Catherine Jheon’s infamous article of her family’s gentrification move gone terribly wrong, We Bought a Crack House).