I deviate from the norm of my society in several specific ways that are so severe that I often can’t comprehend what the middle of the bell curve could look like.

For instance, most people are at some level nervous or anxious about public speaking. It outright terrifies some people, and most folks would prefer not to.

I love it. The more people, the better. I’m more nervous talking to one person than 10,000.

To me, public speaking is easier. It has rules, and I do well with rules. Tomorrow I have a big speaking engagement, and I’m more nervous about the pre-talk meeting with my boss than the actual event.

I have a number of extremely irrational phobias that are so ridiculous I don’t even want to mention them here. So I understand the concept of an irrational fear of an unlikely event. But when thinking of my fears, I can articulate to you EXACTLY what I (irrationally) think will happen. My higher brain knows that the statistical probability is very low, but the vividness of my mental image makes me afraid of this thing regardless.

So, that’s my question: for those of you who are genuinely afraid of public speaking, what mental image do you conjure as the event you fear? What does it actually look like? Do other people even treat fears this way?

People’s lives are their own. In addition to the respect you should afford others with regards to their own decisions, they always have more “local knowledge” than you do. But even if you’re in a situation with someone where it’s appropriate to give advice, you should aim to “teach someone to fish” as much as possible.

That means asking questions. It means leaving ego at the door and not making assumptions. It means respecting that their fundamental goals and values might differ from yours, so good advice needs to be good advice for them, not always what you would do.

All that being said, there are definitely times when you need to give someone an action. Sometimes doing too much gentle question-asking in an attempt to get them to a solution just makes them frustrated, and if you “prime the pump” a little you can get great results.

There’s a careful way to do that, however!

For instance, let’s say you have a friend who is in the market for a new car, but they’re really indecisive. You know a lot about cars, and you also know a lot about this friend’s daily activities and vehicular needs, and therefore you probably have some good suggestions. But you don’t want to run their life for them, and nor do you want to take responsibility for their happiness! You ask a few leading questions, like “what kind of mileage do you want,” and “how many seats do you need” and so on, but you’re getting nowhere. You know they need a decent-sized truck with a lot of hauling power, but they just don’t seem to get there.

One idea you could try: give them hilariously bad advice and gather their response! For instance, tell that friend, “I think you should go with something really light and compact, like a Mini Cooper.” You know they spend every weekend hauling firewood and take frequent off-road detours in their job as an electrical lineman. They know this too, so now they suddenly scoff – “a Mini Cooper? No way! I need something with horsepower, and with a ton of cargo space, and a lot of clearance. A Cooper doesn’t have any of that.”

Now you can just slyly grin and ask, “Well, what does?”

See, what you gave them was a focus point. You gave them a suggestion, and they had to explain why it was a terrible one. In so doing, they were able to articulate what they needed.

You weren’t telling them what to do. You were shaking the dust off.

There are other ways you can get the same effect. They all revolve around the same concept: instead of starting with a blank page and asking them to fill it in, give them something, anything, to anchor to and deviate from as needed. Give them hypothetical advice and let them explain why it’s good or bad, in what ways, and where you need to go.

I do this all the time with people and food. Someone will say that they’re hungry but they don’t know what they want to eat (all you people with significant others say hey!). I immediately just name something at random, no deliberation. Sometimes it’s a hole-in-one and we eat there. Other times (…most other times), they say, “no, that’s too X,” or “no, that’s not Y enough,” or some such. But great! Now what I did was force you to add at least one actual parameter. Rinse & repeat a few times and we’ll have actual dinner plans.

That isn’t the same as giving a command or removing agency from someone. But it does nudge them out of their indecision. And sometimes that’s all you need.

Everything you do takes two kinds of time: active time and “dead” time.

Let’s say you have an eight-hour workday. It starts at 9 and ends at 5, Monday through Friday. So you have a 40-hour workweek, right?

No way. You have to commute. You have to arrive early enough to be settled in and ready to work at 9, not walking in the door at 9. You have to get ready to commute. You might have to change when you get home. All told, from the moment you have to start doing work-related things to the moment you stop, you might be looking at 50 hours a week, 60, 70.

This isn’t me railing against the modern work week or anything. It’s just an example of how nothing actually takes only the time it takes. You might be working on a task and someone says “Hey, can I interrupt you for a minute and have you handle this very simple task? It’ll take 2 minutes.” They might be correct in that the task itself is a 2-minute task. But the total disruption to what you’re doing could be way longer. First, you have to stop what you’re doing, losing momentum and having to regain your place later. The other person has to explain the request. You have to get to where you can do it – maybe it’s physically in another location, maybe you have to open different programs, maybe you have to retrieve a different tool or find different info. Then you do the task – boom, 2 minutes, great – and then you do all of that in reverse to get back to what you were doing originally.

This is why blocks of related work time are valuable – the “dead time” tends to be clustered around the start and finish, so if you have fewer starts and fewer finishes you have less dead time. (Incidentally, that’s why I always preferred a four-day workweek of 10-hour days as opposed to an 5/8 setup when I worked hourly. If you manage hourly employees, try it.)

The reason this is relevant is because dead time adds up. Especially if you do a lot of smaller, unrelated tasks as opposed to big blocks of uninterrupted things, the dead time can really kill productivity and efficiency if not managed – or at least expected.

Consider: you have 10 tasks to do, and you (accurately!) predict that each of them alone will take 30 minutes. So you end up assuming you’ve got 5 hours of work ahead of you, but it ends up taking twice that and you end up very frustrated, behind schedule, or failing. That’s the dead time – those 10- and 15-minute transitions barely seem like enough to consider during the planning stage, but they add up very quickly when you have a lot of them.

And also, like, people go to the bathroom. They eat. They stretch their legs. Those are pretty important.

When you’re planning your own tasks (and especially other people’s!), make sure you’re giving ample allowance for dead time. It’s fine to try to cut down on it – if there’s 45 minutes of dead time on either side of every 10-minute task, that’s a problem – but you can’t ever really eliminate it and you’ll be frustrated and stressed forever if you try.

Junk collects in all sorts of odd neglected corners. That’s why we change the oil in our cars – even if everything is going well and there are no major incidents, processes just collect dirt and detritus.

You’re no different. You’re a process.

There are apps on your phone sending you reminders you haven’t needed or heeded in months. There are emails in your inbox that have long since outlived any relevance. There are habits you have that don’t help you anymore.

Every few months or so, change your oil. Go somewhere, physically, outside your normal routine and just check in on all those things. Get rid of stuff you don’t need, clean everything, and put it back on the road.

During my entire childhood, I was “gifted & talented.” I was the bright kid. Top of my class. Great grades. And so on.

It was all bunk.

Since most schools group by age, almost every school will have a cutoff date for each year’s incoming kindergarten class – if you’re not 5 years old by that date, you wait until next year. My birthday happens to fall about a week after the traditional cutoff date. It was close enough that my parents could probably have made a stink about it and gotten me in anyway, but since I had a close cousin who would be attending the following year anyway, the family decided not to push it and just let me roll over to the following year’s class.

I wasn’t the bright kid. I was a full year older than all of my peers!

I’m going to tell you a secret – even an average 6-year-old looks like a freakin’ genius next to a group of 5-year-olds. That whole year is a big deal. Sure, there are individual exceptions all over the place, but we’re talking about group dynamics here – I was definitely at the far end of the bell curve, but it was only because I was in the wrong bell curve.

(Fun note: this is true in high school sports, too. Want a kid to be a rock star in high school football? Make sure he’s born just after the cutoff date so he’s the oldest kid in his grade, and thus more physically developed than his competition.)

Anyway, while I certainly don’t think I’m unintelligent or anything, I’m certainly not the genius I was painted as in my youth. Another note of unfairness – I remember how often that aforementioned cousin got compared to me academically, since his grades were never as good as mine. But I don’t recall it ever being mentioned once that he was a year younger than I was! It was wildly unfair to compare our fourth-grade report cards, but we spent so much time together that it just naturally happened. He wasn’t any less smart than I was, I just had a full trip around the sun’s head start on him in brain development.

And in fact, that same cousin does extremely well. He turned out great – he has an awesome job, a wonderful family, owns two houses, is satisfied with his work, great circle of friends. No one is without their flaws or troubles, but I admire him greatly. My dumb straight A report card never did a thing for me, but you know what he developed far earlier than most?

A stellar work ethic.

My cousin is an absolute workhorse. One of the hardest-working guys I know, in fact, and he’s been that way forever. I had to kill a lot of bad habits in my 20’s that he never developed in the first place because he was grinding too hard. And he enjoys his success! He’s a workhorse, but not a workaholic. He spends time with his family, he has a tight circle of friends, and he barbecues at his lake house. He’s in his 30’s.

A year younger than me, remember?

My oldest daughter is incredibly bright. I’m trying to keep her from realizing it. I explained to her tonight that intelligence is like flour, eggs and milk – but hard work is turning them into pancakes. You can make even mediocre ingredients into great pancakes, but without the process of mixing and cooking, even the best ingredients won’t taste good by themselves. Intelligence is the raw material, but only hard work will make anything of it.

She’s in karate, and she’s very good. Talented. But tonight, watching her in class, I noticed something. There was a particular exercise they did that she wasn’t very naturally good at – it involved balance and rhythm, which aren’t her strong suits (she’s tall and lanky, which makes her naturally great at a lot of exercises relating to speed, jumping, and reach – but not balance). She dismissed it quickly, not just because she wasn’t good at it, but because she was so good at so many other things she didn’t think it mattered.

Boom, target acquired!

I told her at dinner afterwards that if she could do fifty of that exercise in a row without messing up (in front of her instructor!), I’d give her $100. I even let her pick that number.

Let the games begin. Natural talent is great, and I want to always encourage her in the things she enjoys and praise her for a job well done – but that work ethic needs to come now. Because “gifted & talented” really just means you had the head start, but once everyone is grown up, the advantage fades. Then it’s all about who can out-work the competition. And I want to make sure it’s her.

Plenty of people are troubled by impostor syndrome. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, it’s that feeling a lot of people get where they think that their success and skills and abilities are all in some part false, over-hyped, or built on a house of cards – while of course everyone else is a solid professional who really, actually know what they’re doing. You’re just one slip-up from everyone learning what a fraud you are, says this anxiety.

Hey, just in case you needed to hear it today – it’s not true!

It’s actually pretty difficult to fake competency for any length of time, so if you’ve “had everybody fooled” for anything more than a few days, you probably actually do know what you’re talking about, and you’ll be fine.

In fact, that’s what I’m thinking about today. A sort of impostor-syndrome-by-proxy, or a “second order impostor syndrome” that I notice seems to affect people.

Here’s how it works: You know your stuff with regards to some particular subject matter. You’re actually quite the expert. And you don’t doubt yourself! You feel very confident in your knowledge. Where the doubt kicks in is when you think about anyone else feeling that way.

So it’s sort of like the reverse of impostor syndrome in a way, too. Unlike impostor syndrome, where everyone else probably thinks you’re fine and YOU think you’re a fraud, in this version you actually have full confidence in yourself and you think everyone ELSE will think you’re a fraud.

Opposite but related! You see, if you think that everyone else will think that you’re a fraud, you’re just as unlikely to put yourself out there as if you think you’re a fraud.

You think to yourself, “I know I can do this,” or “I know I’m right about this,” or something, but then say, “but I’m just XYZ, so they won’t listen.” (Substitute anything you like for “XYZ” – you think you’re too young, or you don’t have some credential, or you haven’t been in the industry long enough, or whatever.)

You doubt your ability to make yourself seen and heard in your area of expertise.

Second-order Impostor Syndrome. You don’t think you’re a fraud, but you’re convinced everyone else will think so.

Often this comes with a fear of rejection, or even a fear of insulting someone by even offering your knowledge. “Who am I to tell this big shot how they could improve their website?” or “Who am I to suggest that some CEO might be leaving money on the table in their manufacturing?”

I’ll tell you who you are: someone who knows something they don’t.

No matter how successful someone is, they’re not omniscient. All it takes to learn something from someone is for them to know something you don’t. And even really successful people have blind spots – in fact, the larger your realm of responsibilities, the more likely it is that there are places you can’t see directly.

Combine that with the fact that if someone really is such a big shot that you feel a wide gap between you and them – what have you got to lose by offering up your insights?

People think of taking risks like jumping across a wide chasm, where the two possible outcomes are making it to the other side or plummeting to your death, and thus often decide it’s better not to jump at all. But that’s the wrong analogy. It’s much more like trying to jump to reach a high shelf from where you’re standing – the two outcomes are that you make it or you don’t, but if you don’t you’re just back where you started, no worse off. In that case – why not jump?

Have you ever played Tetris?

If you’re one of the three people on Earth unfamiliar with this game, you have to line up clusters of squares in such a way that they eliminate themselves by forming a complete line from one end of the screen to the other, while more (often of the incorrect shape for what you need) fall from the top with increasing rapidity. You play until you aren’t fast enough, and you lose.

You can’t win.

There’s no victory condition. You just play until you can’t any more. Your goal is to lose slower. The better you get at Tetris? Your reward is just that you get to play more Tetris.

There are traps like that in life just lurking all over the place. Things you can do whose only reward is to get better at that thing, maybe do more of it, but the “it” isn’t that great to begin with. I don’t mean to bash Tetris if you love it as a pass-time or something, but at least with Tetris you know it’s a meaningless distraction. Other things in your life act a lot like that, but without the cool music and flashing lights to let you know that you’re playing a game that you should stop at some point.

Other things you can waste your whole life doing like that.

If you really like doing something, go ahead and spend your whole life doing it. But come up for air every once in a while and ask yourself if you actually really like what you’re doing. It’s okay to stop if you don’t. And if you’re doing something for the sake of some other value it can give you – money, skill at a related but separate task, prestige, etc. – then make sure you set yourself a limit where you say “when I get to this point, I’ll have done this enough to be okay with quitting since I don’t really enjoy the thing in itself.”

You don’t always need the high score at everything. You can go for a personal best, or you can play the game for fun, or you can use it to learn. Sometimes more than one. But don’t just line up the blocks for the sake of it. They all disappear anyway.

You’re allowed to like stuff!

You can even like stuff that isn’t your normal stuff, or things that would feel weird to like. I’m not really a sports guy, but I am a gets-excited-about-people guy, and people are excited today. They’re cheering for something, and we don’t cheer for enough stuff.

Cheer for more stuff. Share excitement. Be happy that people find joy in things, and dive in.

Go team go!