As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off.
Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance.
Having a sense of humor saves you.

Every step you take has a 50% chance to succeed or end up in failure, and if our success is build on pride of a man it shall surely fall, but not before it is shaken. Let God be the rock where you built your success.

TO BE SUCCESSFUL IN LIFE, THE BEST PLACE TO START FROM IS WHERE YOU ARE, WITH WHAT YOU HAVE.

Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.

I had thought in those years, I suppose, having learned the lesson from my mother well, that it was foolish to ask for too much out of life, afterwards only to live in the wake of that expectation, an irreducible disappointment. But what pain, I thought now, could be greater than to realize that even the practical reality for which you had assumed to settle upon, did not hold – that even that was illusory? Would it not be better, then, to set your sights on some more fantastic and rare dream from which even in failing you might take some comfort in having once aspired?

One of the key things is learning which bits of life you don't need to take seriously. Usually far more than you expect.