Guide to Life

Guide to Life: Breathe Life Into Your Old Computer

When you pull a brand new MacBook Pro out of the box it looks so neat and sleek and immortal; it’s hard to imagine a day when that thing will be so slow it’ll make you want to drive an adze through it. But age, lack of space and low memory have set their marks on it.

Guide to Life: Remove or Replace a P-Trap

You just drilled a three pointer like Kobe. Unfortunately, the hoop was the sink drain and the ball was your wedding ring/contact/paper boat (dear lord, don’t go down after that thing!).

How to Get the Best Sound Out of Your Music Library

Format, quality and compression: three important factors in how to listen better.

Improving Your Pool Game Starts with the Break

You’ve seen him. “That guy”, who tries to hit the cue ball as hard as he can, only to send it directly into the corner pocket.

Guide to Life: Pack a Suit

You have a job interview. Or maybe it’s a wedding.

Guide to Life: Read Better Magazines

Switching up your periodicals is a great way to expand your horizons and change your tendencies. Just like you eschewed Highlights and SI Kids, it’s time to explore some new frontiers when it comes to what’s arriving in your mailbox.

Guide to Life: Use Proper Grammar

Writing with proper grammar is one of the easiest ways to establish credibility. Correcting a few common errors and linking the proper usage to logic rather than obscure, bespectacled experts hiding in style guide castles will improve both your mood and your writing.

Guide to Life: Wear One Watch For All Seasons

There are worse ways to spend your hard-earned money than on those pinnacles of the mechanical art. But there’s something to be said for wearing one watch all the the time.

Guide to Life: Start a Jazz Collection

For a genre that’s been around about 100 years, jazz has an insanely dense catalog of great music ranging from big-band swing to fusion to bebop to dixieland. There’s no better way to learn than diving in — it’ll become quickly apparent what moves you.

Guide to Life: Take Down an Assailant

The best fight is the one the that never happens, the one you walk away from because the assault to your pride, your team, your girlfriend — your whatever — isn’t worth ending your night early, the risk of injury (to you or the other guy) or jail. However, we recognize that sometimes walking away isn’t possible.

Guide to Life: Season a Cast Iron Skillet

Cooking with cast iron is all about using a simple, high quality tool to create beautiful food, year after year, and getting better along the way. To do that you need to cultivate your culinary skills and keep your skillet properly seasoned, which is to say, coated in a hard layer of polymerized fat.

Guide to Life: Upgrade Your Light Switch

Science continues to prove that lighting affects our energy level, mood and sleep patterns more than we think — not to mention playing a tremendous role in altering the look and feel of interior spaces. Swapping out a traditional on/off switch for a dimmer is a fast home upgrade that provides immediate impact in any lighting scenario.

Guide to Life: Hold and Shoot a Handgun Properly

You hope to never be in situation where you have to use a firearm. But if it happens, you should be prepared to do it properly to save your life or that of someone you love, or both.

Guide to Life: Ditch the Chip

Decrying the snack a week after the Super Bowl might seem heretical, but look: if you don’t stop your addictions to croissants or lard-chips or the ungodly delicious class of “puffed” snacks, one of these days you’re going to need a triple bypass, and there’s no use blaming genetics. So rather than even considering cutting down or stopping entirely, I’ve decided to head off cholesterol at the pass with some healthier snacking alternatives.

Guide to Life: Shave with a Straight Razor

Alexander the Great told his soldiers to be clean shaven so that the enemy couldn’t pull on their beards in battle. And how did ol’ Alex and his boys do it?

Guide to Life: Be Articulate

At its most basic, being articulate simply means communicating well. Understanding words and how they work is essential part of the equation; once you learn linguistic basics, the rest will happen automatically — like buying nice pieces of clothing will make you a better dresser.

Guide to Life: Write a Letter Like Steinbeck

A good letter takes honesty, emotion and patience. If you can’t provide those things, tap Hallmark to provide them for you.

Guide to Life: Throw a Perfect Spiral

We take our pick-up sports with a healthy dose of enthusiasm. A casual game of touch football is the perfect outlet for friendly competition, (a little bit of) athleticism and a chance to revel in some big-game moments like our favorite pros.

Guide to Life: Treat Your Boots Like Royalty

You’ve finally done it — you beat the living shit out of your beautiful new boots. Yes, it was painful at first (the initial scuff caused a minor breakdown), but in the end it felt fulfilling, like the right thing to do.

Guide to Life: Jump Start a Car

Winter is prime dead battery territory, and jump-starting during cold weather requires nearly twice as many cranking amps as its t-shirts-and-shorts counterpart. There’s also another, more worrisome issue to deal with: regardless of weather, most people go about their jump-starts incorrectly.

Introducing: The GP Guide to Life

We’ve got some ideas about how to make your life better. 30 of them, to be exact.