It’s not just the amazing 1990 album by They Might Be Giants – it’s also the current condition of my basement!

We’re getting some pretty crazy storms out here in the Mid-Atlantic region. Today while I was driving, I had to take a detour to avoid a major highway shutdown, and when I passed the highway in question, I saw an emergency rescue vehicle on the road.

It was a boat.

No kidding – the local fire team had an emergency raft and had deployed it to rescue people stuck in the flooded streets.

The weather out here is crazy. This morning I was building and flying a kite. Then they have to deploy street-boats and my basement floods. New Jersey is weird; it’s the only place I’ve ever lived where it can be below freezing and still rain. In the winter Jersey gets this sort of sludge made of water, ocean salt and industrial goo that just stands like jell-o, three inches thick but still completely liquid. And our summer storms are insane. Imagine the difference between taking a shower and just having an entire bathtub full of water dumped on you at once. That’s the difference between normal rain and what we get. It’ll only last five minutes but drop twenty inches of water on us.

I really like to do this sort of Doogie Howser thing where I find the episode-summarizing lesson in everything that happens to me. But the lesson here is probably just that sometimes stuff happens. You’re not being punished and your life isn’t worse than anyone else’s just because of a bad event. You have to roll with it sometimes. Break out the mop and bucket and get to work. It’s good for you to get humbled by nature now and then, just to remind you how good you really have it.

This morning I made a kite with my oldest kid.

She was in charge of decoration; I was in charge of construction. I can tell you that the kite was very well decorated.

I didn’t get up this morning with a plan to build a kite. In fact, I had a lot of other things I needed to do; it’s a busy day. I had a plan all laid out for what I wanted to accomplish today. My plans are often quite resilient, but there’s no such thing as a plan that never changes. What happens when you have to change and adapt?

That’s why principles are greater than plans.

A firm set of values that guides your decision-making is better than a concrete plan. Principles allow you to adapt without confusion. They let you restructure a plan without losing sight of what’s important. Sometimes they even give you the mental tools you need to change or abandon a goal that no longer fits with your life.

And sometimes they tell you that all the important things you had to do this morning aren’t as important as making a beautiful, poorly-constructed kite and then running around the yard like maniacs, laughing hysterically while trying to fly it.

There are many versions of you.

I might be two dozen people in a given week. Though they share many traits, they’re distinct. Unfairly, many of them reap the benefits of the hard work of others, and some are punished for things others did.

For instance, many times a week there is an Industrious Johnny, who works very hard to make money. That version of me rarely, if ever, sees the reward of that labor. Instead, Dad Johnny who relaxes on Sundays and plays with his kids gets that benefit. And Sunday night, after the kids are in bed, Movie Buff Johnny swore he’d get a head start on Monday’s work so that Industrious Johnny could get a little break, but (unsurprisingly) that jerk just watched a movie instead. But does Movie Buff Johnny pay the price for his sloth? Ha, no way! He enjoyed watching The Truman Show for the eighty-seventh time (seriously, he loves that movie) and hadn’t a care in the world.

Sometimes Hungry Johnny has to eat, but it’s Working Johnny that picks up his tab. Happy-With-Himself-In-The-Mirror Johnny reaps all the rewards from Workout Johnny’s efforts, and Workout Johnny has to work extra hard when Weakness-For-Twix-Bars Johnny indulges.

Now, Movie Buff Johnny and Weakness-For-Twix-Bars Johnny aren’t bad guys. They’re crucial for the morale of the team. You just can’t put them in charge.

Fortunately, there’s a Principled Life Plan Johnny. He’s far from perfect, but he’s doing a pretty good job with this ragtag group of misfits. And that’s what it’s all about – managing the team. Because almost all versions of Johnny don’t actually get what they deserve; they all usually work hard and get no benefits, or get benefits but don’t work hard, or make mistakes others pay for, and so on. If there wasn’t a good manager at the helm, they’d riot.

When you see people who lack discipline in their lives, maybe it’s just a failure of leadership. Their Workout Steve or whoever got tired of busting his hump just for Six Pack Steve to constantly ruin it, because there was no Principled Life Plan Steve to tell Six Pack Steve to take it easy. And Six Pack Steve hasn’t even met Dies-Early-From-Liver-Failure Steve yet, so he doesn’t really care about that guy.

Your mission, as Principled Life Plan You, is to manage this team the way any good team leader would. You mentor the good team members and help them grow, giving them the tools to succeed and promoting them to positions of greater authority and influence. You help put other people in the roles where they perform the best and make the best contributions to the team: Movie Buff Johnny is great for team morale in small doses, but I have to be careful not to let him take over when it’s supposed to be Workout Johnny’s shift. Sometimes you have to make hard calls and fire people, even if you like them, because it’s what’s best for the team. Liquor Johnny used to be a really fun guy, but he just wasn’t a team player.

When the team is managed well, their needs and abilities considered and the overall health of the team made a priority, everybody wins.

This has been Blogging Johnny, signing off. See you tomorrow.

I have some advice for you today: Only do things that you would pay to do.

That’s a more easily-graspable way of saying “only do things that have value from your perspective.” I love movies; I’m a huge movie buff. I don’t actually go to the movies that often; instead I watch many movies on my home theater setup. Why? Because going to the movies is expensive, and watching them at home isn’t.

“Inexpensive” doesn’t mean “free,” though. Even ignoring all the initial costs to set up my home theater, and ignoring minor unit costs like the electricity to run it and so on, it’s expensive in time. I watch movies because I enjoy them, and there’s value in that. But from a strictly revenue-generating standpoint, I could certainly be doing something more effective with my time.

Obviously some relaxation and entertainment has value – it might even be essential. But we overindulge easily; especially when the costs are more hidden. I don’t go to the movies often because the costs are very obvious; I have to pull out my wallet. The costs in idle time are more subtle.

If watching a movie at home cost me a dollar – a real, immediate dollar I had to pay – I would still watch movies. I might not watch as many, but I’d do it.

But what if I had to pay a dollar every time I argued with someone on Twitter or Reddit? Would I still do that? Heck no. (Note: That’s just an illustrative example; in reality I find that so unpleasant that I rarely if ever actually do it. But I know it’s an irresistible temptation for many!) So that’s a good benchmark – think of every decision in your life as costing a dollar, and see which ones you’d still do.

Would you pay a dollar to spend time with your children? I hope! Would you pay a dollar to honk your horn at that jerk that cut you off? Maybe not – or at least you’d be aware of how often you did it, and maybe do it less.

This is the Swear Jar, but for every decision you make.

Once I started thinking about this, so many things immediately fell into the system for me. Would I pay a dollar to read a blog I found interesting? Almost certainly. Would I pay another dollar to read the comments? Heck no.

I think most people’s lives would get measurably better if they imposed a cost of a dollar on every action they took, even if only in the mind. It’s an easier way to discipline yourself into only doing things with real value to you, instead of the idle time sinks and negative responses we’re all so prone to as humans.

Hopefully the value of this blog was at least one hundred and one cents to you!

Today is my first Father’s Day with what I assume is all my kids. My youngest was born this past August, and I don’t have any plans to have any more. Surprises can always happen, but I think these three are it. If that holds true, then today is the first Father’s day with my full set.

I am always reminded on Father’s day of my simultaneous great fortune and terrible misfortune. I have three wonderful children; the best I could ask for. Unfortunately, I also have an extremely awesome dad myself, and he sets an impossible standard I couldn’t possibly live up to.

He is a nearly-mythic figure. The stories about him are legendary. He’s hilarious, he’s fearless, he’s hyper-competent and he loves life. Like all real people, he has his flaws, but they pale in comparison to his virtues. They don’t make ’em like him anymore.

Happy Father’s Day to all those who are or who have fathers or father figures. Cheers.

I read an interesting comment today: “Your politics consist of those things which you consider outside the realm of politics.”

That certainly strikes me as apt. Let me explain, for those of you that have never had the pleasure of visiting, how things work in the real world. No one ever gets exactly, perfectly what they want. Human wants and desires are infinite not only in their scope, but also in their specificity. They’re also all different – what you want is not the same as what I want, and resources are finite, so we can’t all have our cake and eat it too.

In the Real World ™, we maneuver and negotiate and bargain and work for what we want. I can’t have X if you have Y, so we figure out how we can both get close and still be happy. The best case scenario is the Win/Win, where I find someone else who wants Y and that actually gets me closer to X, so we help each other and we’re both better off. In some instances, people who are bad at all of this just hit someone else and take their X, but in the long run that rarely works out for anyone.

During this whole process is the explicit understanding that you wanting Y is okay even if I want X. If those are opposed we make deals. If they’re complimentary we have a win/win. If there’s no way to make a deal, maybe I give up Z to get something else instead.

That’s the real world. Then there’s politics.

There are two kinds of capital-P politics. There’s “political discourse” which is all the noise you hear when you accidentally walk past a television or your finger slips on Twitter. Then there’s Politics-As-It-Actually-Happens.

In political discourse, there’s no bargaining. What you want is common sense, universal, moral and just. What the other person wants is barbaric and disgusting and the death of civilization. You can’t bargain with the horde; they have nothing you want. They don’t even have wants themselves; they only want to destroy what you, the good people, want for the world. Everything would be perfect if not for Them.

Then, strangely, in Politics-As-It-Actually-Happens, all the people with any real political clout do as much if not more bargaining and deal-trading as anyone in the Real World, only they always refuse to admit that’s what they’re doing. Their outward rhetoric is exactly the same as the “political discourse” people, except then they quietly say yeah you can have X if I can have Y to other people in their realm wearing different colored ties.

So, “your politics consist of those things which you consider outside the realm of politics.” Whatever you think shouldn’t even be something political, that’s your politics. Unfortunately, in politics, that’s everything. Nobody says, “I believe healthcare is a fundamental human right, but I’m open to changing my mind based on the electoral process.” No one makes a sign saying “If they want my guns, they can come take them, which I’ll happily allow if a law is passed to that effect.” In politics, there are only two kinds of things: Things you care so deeply about and that are so obviously correct that they shouldn’t be touched by politics at all, and things you don’t care about at all.

Everything in life is trade-offs and opportunity costs. You build the best life you can for you and those around you out of the available pieces you have; that’s the whole game, start to finish. Playing that game makes you smarter; you’ve got skin in the game so you’re more likely to be correct about decisions. You’ll build a better world for yourself by helping others do the same. A beautiful series of overlapping bubbles that lift the whole world up.

One of the best trade-offs you can make? Trade the time you used to spend thinking about politics for time spent enjoying life.

All knowledge is acquired.

We are, probably to both our tremendous benefit and our great peril, born knowing absolutely nothing. We don’t even have great survival instincts, as animals go. We’re blank slates.

All the knowledge we have, we have because of experiences. Sometimes it’s the experience of someone having told us something that we miraculously retained (and trust me, it’s miraculous when we retain anything someone teaches us), and a lot of the time it’s because we encountered some barrier between us and our goals that we could only overcome by learning a new tidbit. Those are the best ones.

But everyone’s journey is different, and the things you know, you know because of yours. When we encounter people that don’t know what we know, we often have the unfortunate instinct to deride them or at least inwardly consider them less intelligent than we are. We scoff and say “I can’t believe they don’t know that! It’s such an elementary fact!” But of course it isn’t.

Meanwhile, when we encounter people who know things we don’t know – like, for instance, literally everyone – we dismiss their information. “If I don’t already know it, it’s probably either untrue or so academic and obscure that it’s a useless bit of trivia. Surely I already know all the relevant and important things!” Hogwash.

The exchange of new information – facts, ideas, jokes, stories, anything – is one of the truly great and divine experiences we get to have, and it’s out there to be had every day of your life if you want it.

You should be thrilled at these opportunities! Every single person you meet, every conversation you have, is a chance to get smarter. Every time you meet someone who doesn’t know some “elementary fact” that you know is a chance for you to make a difference and improve someone’s life!

I’d love to know what you have to teach me. Tell me!

I think it’s a good thing to be public about your past failings.

I am constantly tempted to go back and erase things I’ve written publicly in the past, because they don’t perfectly demonstrate my current view. I like to think I’m the kind of person who readily incorporates new information into their life philosophy, but that means that something I wrote a year ago might not be perfectly reflective of who I am today.

It’s not wildly off; my core values are what they are. But how I’ve learned to wrap those values around the world as it is has certainly changed, and hopefully for the better. I’m always trying to learn and improve. One of the perils of being even mildly successful at continual self-improvement is that your past self can seem awful by comparison.

So, I sometimes go back and look at old articles I’ve written or posts on various sites. Some have aged like fine wine, and I’m still proud of them. Others make me cringe.

But I don’t want to erase that. That’s my journey. That’s how I got where I am. If I found anything so egregious that it would truly make me ashamed, I’d rather write about it now than erase what I did before. But for the most part, it’s not stuff that I’m ashamed of; more stuff that I’d shake my head at and say “you’ve got a lot to learn, kid.”

I did have a lot to learn. I still do. I love learning it. So I’m okay with leaving those bread crumbs. Maybe in a few years I’ll read this and cringe, but hopefully I’ll appreciate each step for what it was. Part of a greater journey.

The other day I found myself in a stressful situation; I had a particularly long to-do list and most of them were fairly urgent. I found myself stalling out for a moment as I contemplated what order I should do those things in. How should I structure this? What should my plan of attack be?

And I had an “Ah ha!” moment. A clear voice in my head yelled at me: “Pick at random. Do literally anything.”

It was a wise voice.

See, there were several advantages to this particular method. First, planning isn’t doing. I needed to get stuff done, right away. When you’re trying to improve your situation, whether long term or short term, doing literally anything is almost always an improvement over doing nothing. So right away, the task got a little less daunting and I gained a little momentum.

But there was another big advantage. Stress clouds your thought process! When you’re under the gun, you’re not thinking clearly. That’s why “shower thoughts” are a real thing – when you’re relaxed and not actively trying to think about something, great inspiration and creativity can strike you. Sitting down and tackling one of those tasks took a lot of stress away, because I was now actively working on something. As a result, I was easily able to think through how I wanted to plan the rest of my tasks while I was doing the first one, and the rest of the day went by more easily. Mission accomplished.

So, you’ve decided that you want to get healthier. You have ideas about meal planning and calorie counting, balancing nutrients and maybe even consulting a dietitian or nutritionist. You want to join a gym, hire a personal trainer, build a fitness regimen and buy some equipment for that purpose. Hey, that’s all great. But that can all be so daunting that you don’t ever actually do it. The easiest way to get started?

Do literally anything. Walk around the block! Hooray, you did it! You got started! That’s all it took.

This is the greatest advice you’ll ever get, because it’s simultaneously really easy and applicable to every situation. No matter what your current status is, if you want to improve it – do literally anything. You can work out details as you go, you can improve your path as you walk it. Just dive in the deep end and swim around. Trust me, you’ll be fine.

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” – Zig Ziglar

Would you know what success looked like if you saw it?

People want to be successful. I’m a big proponent of ambition, so I don’t find anything wrong with that in itself. But that’s nowhere near enough of a plan to be actionable.

Before it sinks so deeply into your psyche that you can’t ever be rid of it, I want you to clear your mind of the idea of success that society has given to you. Maybe you want an $80,000/year salaried job to pay for your nice house in suburbia, where you and your spouse can raise your 2.3 kids and your dog in relative security. That’s a nice life, and I don’t begrudge anyone who wants it. But you shouldn’t want it by default.

You also shouldn’t think that there’s only one road to get there. Not only is there more than one road, there are millions.

Let me ask you a hard question: What does a successful person look like? Would you know them if you saw them? When people are posing for the cameras – when they’re posting their cultivated life on Instagram or showing off their latest toys in the neighborhood – you see what that person wants the world to believe success looks like.

Instead, just go to the DMV and watch people come and go. Some of them took nice vacations on their yachts last year. Others struggled to pay for necessities. You’d have a hard time telling which is which just by the very candid glimpse you get of them in this setting.

So that’s Step One. Get rid of the idea that “success” is a snapshot, a singular moment in time. It’s not a picture on social media or a signed deed to a house. There’s no finish line at all – except for The Big One at the end.

Knowing that, move onto Step Two. Redefine “success” as a particular journey. In other words, I’m not successful because at this moment in time I make X dollars or have such and such things or experiences. I’m successful because on a regular basis I do what I love without having to do very much that I hate. And I improve that ratio all the time. Early on, I had to do a lot of things I didn’t like in order to do a small amount of things I did like, but I was also investing in my future. Now, the mix is better. Over my life I intend to keep improving it until eventually I barely do anything I don’t like at all, and tons of stuff I love. But there’s no 100% – you can only approach infinity, you can’t reach it.

So now you’ve gotten rid of the idea of success as an imprint, and grasped the idea of success as a continuous journey. The last part, Step Three, is to decide what journey you’ll take. They’re all different. Find the one that matches what makes you happy and pursue it with all your might. Don’t judge others for theirs – they’re different than you. Help them if you can, love them for their journey.

Take the long way home.