Of all the influences from the past 100 years, the Bauhaus—the venerable art and design school founded in 1919—has had the most enduring impact on the world, from the modern products and furniture we buy, to the graphics we see, and the architecture we inhabit. Yet while scholars have pored over the school and deconstructed its teachings for decades, many untold stories still wait to be unearthed.

This month, the Harvard Art Museum is highlighting them, launching a digital archive of its immense collection of Bauhaus-related artworks, prototypes, documents, prints, drawings, and photographs. The archive is the legacy of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, who became a professor at Harvard in 1937 after the school closed in 1933 (the Nazis did not agree with its experimental teachings), bringing his knowledge and ephemera to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The new microsite is a valuable design resource that makes the pieces accessible to the entire world. It’s intended to be a portal into the Bauhaus’s work and a study tool to help inform further scholarship into the institution’s legacy and impact. (In fact, Bauhaus superfans take note: anyone can make an appointment to view any of the holdings first-hand, assuming that they’re not on loan.) Robert Wiesenberger, a curatorial fellow at the museum, developed the online collection, which involved making sense of the 32,000 Bauhaus-related pieces in the collection: categorizing, interpreting, and adding just enough context to orient visitors to the site.

“First and foremost, the Bauhaus was a school of art and design—and it was filled with contradiction,” Wiesenberger says. “I really wanted to surface objects and provide a little context. Since there are already shelves and shelves of books about the Bauhaus, I didn’t want to regurgitate a history; however, if the subject is new to someone, there’s a primer.”

We asked Wiesenberger to share a handful of unexpected design lessons to be gleaned from Bauhaus objects in the Harvard Art Museum’s collection.

In the age of unlimited digital storage, it’s easy to forget that purposeful documentation is important. It’s more than just taking a snapshot on your camera phone as an afterthought—it’s about annotation and being conscious of what you’re recording in notes so that you can trace the development of an idea.

“Most of what we know of the Bauhaus’s output is from the photographs taken at the school,” Wiesenberger says. “The architecture changed, suffered damage, or was destroyed; though many of the products were intended for mass production, they often only ever existed as one-off prototypes or in limited quantities and have been lost along the way. Luckily, some Bauhäusler—the term for people attending and working at the Bauhaus—captured the school’s work photographically, both for artistic reasons and to help the Bauhaus commercialize what was made there.”

“The most brilliant of these artists was Lucia Moholy, the wife of Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, whose precise, dead-on depictions of objects are still some of the most-circulated images from the school. Yet even so-called ‘objective’ documentation is not neutral, either: Many decisions are made behind the camera, and Lucia’s name was effaced from the historical record in part by Walter Gropius, with whom she entrusted her negatives when she fled Germany.”

Few of us are diligent diarists; however keeping track of everything can help designers today—and in the future. If it weren’t for Lucia Moholy and her obsessive photography, we wouldn’t have as much knowledge of the Bauhaus since many of the physical objects are lost.

Everyone loves a rager, even the serious rationalists at the Bauhaus.

“The Bauhaus famously threw incredible parties,” Wiesenberger says. “For the ‘Metal Party’ in 1929, guests clad in shiny homemade costumes slid in on a chute beneath mirrored orbs hanging from the ceiling. Oskar Schlemmer’s stage workshop, and the metal workshop run by Marianne Brandt, were especially active in the planning. But it wasn’t all just fun and games: Walter Gropius, the school’s director, knew that parties were essential in letting off considerable steam for hard-working and often conflicting Bauhäusler, as the school was full of big personalities with big ideas who often locked horns. Parties helped everyone remember they were part of the same team.”

Design is rarely a solo endeavor and team-building can go a long way in helping to facilitate the conversations that may lead to a creative breakthrough.

Lázsló Moholy-Nagy—a painter, photographer, sculptor, and professor—headed up the Bauhaus’s metal workshop. In 1930, he designed Light Prop for An Electric Stage, which is currently on-view in a retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim Museum.

“It’s kind of an avant-garde disco ball, designed to create kaleidoscopic colored light effects,” Wiesenberger says. “But this, one of the Hungarian Constructivist’s proudest achievements, didn’t emerge from his head fully formed. Rather, he claims that the idea began its gestation in 1922, and it went through multiple versions before its first exhibition in Paris in 1930. But he wasn’t finished with it then, either, and he made many later alterations to optimize its ‘light-modulating’ effects, for example, substituting in matte or glossy pieces of metal.”

“The Light Prop was a new kind of art, made without the artist’s hand, and industrially fabricated like Minimalist art would be in the 1960s. Moholy-Nagy worked with two engineers to design and construct the device, which was built with funding from Germany’s AEG corporation. His name does not appear anywhere on it, but one engineer’s name, Otto Ball, does. Like Marcel Breuer’s iconic tubular steel club chair, which was first prototyped by a plumber, Moholy-Nagy, the ‘universal artist,’ still knew when to call on outside help.”

Just as Breuer and Moholy-Nagy looked to experts from different trades to fuel innovation, designers of today can stand to be open to collaboration from other fields rather than walling themselves off in their respective industries.

Contemporary design is notorious for established rules and having a base in function, research, testing, and strategy. Fantasy, as superfluous as it sounds, has a place, too.

“Paul Klee, born in Switzerland but seemingly from another planet, wasn’t an obvious choice as an instructor at the Bauhaus, a school dedicated to pragmatic design and building,” Wiesenberger says. “Of course the Bauhaus wasn’t always this way, and was founded on utopian ideals and the legacy of German expressionism, but Klee’s continued presence there—for a decade he taught form and color to entering students—was essential to the school’s character well after it dedicated itself to a ‘union of art and technology.’ Klee’s playful drawings channeled nature, poetry, architecture, music, and even magic—Apparatus for the Magnetic Treatment of Plants references the 18th century pseudoscientific idea of animal magnetism while lightly satirizing the machine. Klee enjoyed the reputation of a mystic—though he was certainly a rationalist—and his operating on an entirely different plane from the school’s functional program only enriched students’ experience at the Bauhaus.”

Perhaps the most poignant lesson: while today’s designers have access to advanced tools and materials, everyday surroundings and economy can fuel the next great idea.

“Ruth Asawa, a California-born Japanese-American artist, who learned drawing in a Japanese internment camp, went to Black Mountain College to study with former Bauhaus master Josef Albers,” Wiesenberger says. “Without money for art supplies—like Albers had been in his student days in Weimar—Asawa exemplified her mentor’s credo, of ‘minimal means, maximum effect.’ Like all students at Black Mountain, Asawa worked on campus to help the school run: While posted in the laundry room, she made rubber stamp drawings on newsprint. This one repeats the text ‘Double Sheet’— a double-meaning of both linen size and the folded-over newspaper format. This exemplifies Albers’s lessons of radical economy, transparency, positive and negative space, and the meandering patterns he gave as assignments. As a kind of typographic textile, these works anticipate Asawa’s more famous hanging wire sculptures.”

As we grapple with the need to be more resource efficient, the simplest things might end up having the greatest potential.

To see more of the collection, visit harvardartmuseums.org.

For most of us, our first experience with career advice comes from one source: our parents. As we go through life, the people who have the most interest in the direction we take with our careers continue to be those who are closest to us, like our significant others, friends, mentors, and professors.

Yet, in my experience as a career coach, I can tell you that the tips (and yes, pressure) that come from loved ones can be some of the worst, particularly when it comes to that big-picture question of, “What should I be doing with my life?” Here are two big reasons why.

My mom switched from teaching to accounting about a decade into her professional life. It was a wonderful move for her, and she has had a high level of satisfaction and success with this second career path. Based on this experience, my well-intentioned parents pointed me toward accounting, with the idea that it would also be a great fit for me. (It wasn’t.)

I’ve seen too many people experience something similar—someone they love keeps pouring on suggestions that have absolutely nothing to do with what they want for their careers:

Why would you want to go back to work after having kids when you don’t have to?

You’ll get bored of that subject matter after a year!

Working so many hours always leads to burnout!

In each case, the guidance had more to do with the person providing it than the person receiving it. Just ask that new mom who truly wanted to get back to a job she loved, the social media marketer who still finds the work really compelling, or the individual who thrives on long hours at this point in his career.

The truth is: People are different. Maybe your parent or mentor or would personally hate whatever choice you’re making—but that doesn’t mean you will. If someone keeps questioning your choice or hammering his or her advice, it’s okay to say, “I really appreciate you taking the time to share your personal experience with me. I’ve carefully considered my options, and I’m really excited about this choice. I’d love to hear more about [change the subject].”

Related: How To Deal With Unsolicited Career Advice From Your Family

Most people have a natural desire to protect the people they love. This instinct is highly beneficial around small children, who, if left to their own devices, could walk into traffic without looking or play with matches. But you’re not a small child; you’re an adult who is putting himself or herself out there.

Developing a well-fitting career path often involves putting some skin in the game, being willing to face rejection or failure, making mistakes, and learning along the way. In other words, a great career path will mean getting hurt at times, so that you can learn important lesson. Advice that stems from an attempt to protect you from this natural (and sometimes painful) progression of career development is well-meaning, but ultimately flawed. It can wind up doing more harm than good.

For example, one of my clients was instructed to pursue government work solely on the basis of the perceived stability of the positions. But she was someone who thrived on creativity and wilted at the idea of bureaucracy, so this was not the culture for her.

One way to deal with this kind of advice is to thank your nearest and dearest for caring so deeply, and then remind him or her that no job is 100% safe. Moreover, if you work in a field you really have no interest in, you’re less likely to want to put in the time and effort necessary to advance. Finally, remind him or her that even if you work somewhere that isn’t right for you, you’ll still benefit from the experience.

It’s natural for those closest to us to have opinions about our career decisions. Just remember that at the end of the day it’s your life. You’re the one who actually deals with the consequences and benefits of any given career choice. With that in mind, your opinion is the one that matters most.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.

Scrolling through my social media feed, I noticed a college friend’s photograph of his son’s dormitory. My friend and I had been thick as thieves during our undergraduate years, and now his son was leaving home, and roughly the age his father was when he and I first met.

Suddenly, I was hit with a wave of regret.

We hadn’t seen each other in years, even though we live roughly an hour apart. I don’t really know his children well, and he doesn’t know mine. Over the years, when one of us reached out to the other, we were always busy with work, soccer practices, music lessons, or other commitments. “Next time for sure,” we’d say as we postponed. At one time in our lives, I thought we’d be close pals forever and our children would carry on the next generation of our friendship. It didn’t work out that way.

With a full roster of work, family, friends, and other obligations—not to mention trying to make time to stay healthy and have an occasional moment or two alone—it can be tough to fit in all the things we want and need to do. As we try to keep all of those commitments, it’s not uncommon to form habits and take shortcuts that let us fit more into the day. We may stay at our desks longer, forego vacations, or crowd out time for family and friends.

A recent survey by Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America found that roughly one-third (32%) of Americans regret major choices in their lives.

But what kind of consequences do those decisions have in the long run? Possibly big ones, experts say. Here are some key things you may be doing now that you’ll likely regret in a decade or more.

Many people have relationship regrets, whether they’re related to friends or romantic partners, says Gail Saltz, MD, an associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill-Cornell School of Medicine. The relationship road not taken is a big source of regret among people she sees. Career-focused romantic partners may find themselves either living in different areas or faced with one partner making a sacrifice to be with the other.

“Given the day and age we’re living in now, many, many people feel they shouldn’t have to do that for someone else, and so they don’t,” she says. Later, they may have the great career, but regret that they didn’t try harder to make the relationship work, she says.

While lost friendships are often considered unimportant compared to romantic partners, their loss can be just as painful and regrettable, says Neal Roese, PhD, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and author of If Only: How to Turn Regret Into Opportunity.

When you put in too many hours at work and let those friendships drift away, you’re setting yourself up for regret. Roese has coauthored several studies on regrets and their causes and says that not making time to maintain friendships is a big one, especially because it can be harder to make new deep friendships later in life. This is especially true at work, where friendships with colleagues can boost both happiness and productivity.

It’s easy to end up sitting at your desk all day or blow off working out because you’re tired when you get home. However, failing to make time for regular exercise can affect everything from your overall health to your creativity. As we get older, establishing a regular exercise habit is even more important.

A March 2016 study in the online issue of Neurology found that regular exercise can slow brain aging by as much as 10 years. Saltz says that many people know better, but don’t heed the potential consequences of their actions when they’re younger. “It’s a firmly rooted early belief that I’m invincible, or I’ll be young forever, or these issues of later just don’t pertain to me,” she says.

Similarly, Saltz says compiling a routine health history—including check-ups and routine testing such as blood pressure, cholesterol, and others—is important in the long run. If you’re not compiling a health history and, when possible, sharing health concerns and history with a medical professional, you risk missing important warning signs. Many treatments are time-limited, and early detection can make a big difference in outcomes, she says.

Living in a chronic state of being overscheduled and under a variety of pressures can lead to a number of stress-related behaviors and problems, says stress expert Mary Wingo, PhD, author of The Human Stress Response: The Biological Origins and Responses to Human Stress.

There’s even evidence that prolonged stress can predispose people to mental illness. Wingo says it’s important to find ways to mitigate that stress before it causes damage.

“Sit down—by yourself, with a therapist, self-help group, etc.—and list every single stressor,” Wingo advises. Then make a conscious effort, the way you would if you were going on a diet or quitting smoking, to eliminate what stressors you can, she says. Adopt stress-relieving habits like meditation, exercise, and other practices that are helpful to relieve stress.

Whether it’s fear of not making enough money, disapproval from others, or other concerns, many people let fear rule when it comes to making decisions, which is a common source of regret, says Hal Shorey, PhD, associate professor in the Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology at Widener University.

Instead of taking healthy risks and following their passions or intuition, some people worry that they won’t meet certain standards they, or others, have for themselves and instead make choices that aren’t really right for them. Such fear-based decision making can also lead to ethical issues, which Shorey has seen with his students:

My first management job, and this happens with a lot of my grads, they’re making good money for the first time in their lives, and they think to themselves, “Oh my goodness, I’ve arrived.” Then they’ll be asked to do things professionally that they may think are unethical, or they might be asked to do things professionally that go against their own knowledge of leadership and the right way to do things. Because they’re too concerned about losing the job, they go along with it and conform.

Shorey says that almost inevitably leads to regret.

Of course, it’s not possible to map out a strategy for a regret-free life, and some regrets are bigger than others. However, Roese says that paying attention to the areas where research shows us most people have regrets can help us be more mindful about our choices.

Looking for ways to “have your cake and eat it, too” can help. Nurture friendships at work. Make time for important people in your life. Take care of your health. Being aware of your own values system and what matters to you can also help you make more regret-free decisions, he says.

Says Roese:

Some regrets we just get over. We rationalize or explain them away. But other things linger. I think that the key question that a lot of people like to talk about these days is, let’s say you’ve reached the end of your life, or maybe you’re on your deathbed. What are your deathbed regrets? If you look at these, there might be a recipe for how better to live your life.