Hubski,
What lesson of life or other lesson did you have to learn the hard way? Mind sharing your story with us?
Mine would have to be that if you want something you must go out and get it. No one is just going to hand you something that you want. I've costed myself too much time and money waiting for something to happen that never did. I've said nothing to that person that I disagreed with, and watched them hurt ones I love.
So what's yours?
That talent is not a substitute for hard work. Also, not to make gravy when drunk. Edit: Oh right, you asked for the story too. Well, for the first part . . . I have found that I can pick up lots of things pretty quickly and can become decent at doing them in a short amount of time. However, when I was young I found that people would praise me for this trait and so I would just kind of coast along until challenged. In this way, I ended up giving up on math because I just really didn't want to put the work in and I couldn't be bothered to try to understand that once I had the fundamentals down, a whole new set of interesting things would be open for me to explore. This goes for athletics too. I thought that since what I liked to do athletically came easily, that I didn't have to work on it and so ended up neglecting my training, smoking, drinking, etc. and it took me years to understand that doing something every day helps to improve things even if one can't really see the difference day to day. I guess this is also part of why I didn't write anything for about five years. Lots of people told me that hard work is no substitute for talent, but I didn't really get it until I'd experienced it for myself. I can be pretty stubborn and that's something I work on, in addition to lots of other stuff I feel like I'm catching up on these days. As for the gravy thing, I have a sizable scar on my arm. Lesson learned.
Not having a father figure/older brother around meant I had to teach myself how to "be a man" by myself. Including what "being a man" is even supposed to mean. I am a super sensitive guy, and I've learned to accept that the hard way I guess, haha.
Hey I'm a sensitive guy too. To me being a man is being a good person, being self-aware of your place in the world, caring for others and yourself. I think people tend to think of masculinity and femininity as binaries, when in reality they are a spectrum with most people falling somewhere in-between. I reject many of the traditional personality traits that men are expected to follow, like in this diagram: 
As a female - I told Meriadoc tonight at our meetup that even in my dreams I yell at men who pursue me until they see I am "owned" by another man (I have a tattoo on my ring finger; I am actually single). This ties in tangentially to "views women as property/objects," and I am glad you avoid that, and I encourage all others to do so as well. It is important, I think, to accept that sometimes a woman or man will not want to be with you, and them being "taken" is not the only viable reason for that.
I like your perspective. I think way too many people spend most their time identifying themselves by their sex or sexual orientation. I'm not arguing for asexualness, just that there there are many things more important in life than weather you have a penis or a vagina and weather you'd like to be digging into a penis or a vagina. I identify with being a person a lot more than I do with being a man. I'd rather be a kind, gentle, generous person than I'd like to be any kind of man's man. I'm doing pretty good at the person-hood but probably have a ways to go on the gentle, generous and kind. I'm not against exploring or celebrating ones sex or sexual orientation either, I just don't think it needs to be the core of ones being, that which uplifts, tortures or preoccupies most of ones time. The people who are ruled by their sex or drives seem to be trapped in some kind of eternal high school to me. Feel like I'm coming down to hard on identifying with ones sex or orientation, don't know how to take the judgmental edge of it. I tend bar once a month for a gay dance party event, not the absolute best money I'll make in a day once a month but it's pretty good. It's for an absolutely great bunch of guys just hanging out having a good time being gay. Makes me happy to see the happiness, romance and just plain old social fellowship they enjoy at the event. I know a few of them outside the event as people, good natured, generous and sociable not preoccupied by their sexuality at all. They seem to have hit at a great balance. Not picking on the gays. The hetero guys that are always on the prowl or looking for a fight and the ladies that are always looking to fend off the come on or sizing up each man as a potential mate are odious, unhappy dullards who make life a little more banal and joyless. They would all be happier if they could act like and treat people like people instead of dicks and pussies.
I'm 39. Still working on it. Every so often I'm shocked in either direction. When I was younger, I was deeply shocked to learn that fathers do not usually pester their sons about getting laid. I was also quite annoyed to learn that "just be yourself" was code for "chill out immediately or be ostracized". Those two realizations took me nearly half a decade total to process. On the other side, I get amazed at what other people never had to learn. Perhaps I simply had to put up with more crap as a kid because I was fat. I learned everything I could. I also lived in upstate New York, where you added skills immediately to avoid being fired from the few lousy jobs that existed. I am amazed that people cannot clean hair out of clogged sinks, cannot figure out the tip in their heads (one buck for every five and round up -- where's the skill? $67.29 is $13.50 because 65/5 is 50/5 plus 15/5 and then some). "Adult" is a b.s. term. It only makes sense when you have a Transactional Analysis model: child/adult/parent, similar to id/ego/superego except that the parent is about as useless as actual ego -- the 'parent' wants to teach everyone a lesson whether it's appropriate or not.