My oldest daughter made a cheetah out of a bunch of scrap crafting material and then painted it up. I think she did a pretty excellent job! Along the way, she also learned a bunch of interesting facts about them, which she was happy to share. She also learned a ton of more important foundational lessons, like how to look at a pile of junk and make it take a particular shape in your mind and then manifest that shape, and how to find out information when you don’t even know what you don’t know.

She’s a smart, crafty, funny kid. Today cheetahs, tomorrow anything – this kid’s thirst for knowledge and adventure is boundless.

There’s a saying in business: “Good, fast, cheap. Pick two.”

It makes sense! If you want quality work quickly, you generally have to pay out the nose. If you want quality work cheaply, you have to wait in line behind everyone else that also wants that. And if you want something quickly that you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for, it probably won’t be that good.

That’s a general rule and of course there are exceptions – my local pizza place, for example, is inexpensive, fast, and amazing. But it’s definitely a good general principle to be aware of as you’re evaluating your options for a particular good or service.

And it’s generally a good thing that the market is flexible like that! My needs change from day to day and project to project. One day, I may need a solution quickly and I’m willing to pay top dollar. Another day, I may also need a solution but be short on liquid funds so I’m willing to take a lower-quality solution in order to get it cheap. For one item I may be willing to wait a long time because it isn’t urgent but I’d like what I do get to be of excellent condition, but in another instance I may need something very quickly. So overall, it’s a good thing that for any given product or service, there’s usually at least one option in each of the three broad categores: “Cheap & Fast; Not Good,” “Cheap & Good; Not Fast” and “Fast & Good; Not Cheap.” That lets everyone get what they need based on their particular circumstance.

But imagine one of those axes was fixed. For instance, imagine a mandatory 30-day waiting period was put on every product and service you could buy, thus removing any business’s ability to be “Fast.” Now, there’s only two measurements: the Bad-Good axis and the Cheap-Expensive axis. By removing only one axis, you put two out of every three companies out of business, because only the company that focused on being “Cheap & Good; Not Fast” has any competitive Edge. All of them are “Not Fast” now, so you’ve got one Good company, one Cheap company, and one Cheap & Good company. That’s an easy choice!

But not only do you put 2/3 of companies out of business in this hypothetical, you also do a lot of damage to the consumer. Sure, everyone gets great products at an affordable rate now. But there are many, many purchases where no matter how cheap and how good they were, they’re useless past a certain point. If I’m baking a cake for a party tomorrow and I suddenly realize I don’t have a cake pan, I don’t really need it to be of fine quality – the super-basic one from Wal-Mart will do, but I need it tonight. Waiting 30 days for the best one doesn’t help me; it’s not the right fit for my circumstance. Likewise, if the heater goes out in my house in the middle of winter, waiting 30 days for an inexpensive fix is not a better choice for me than getting an expensive fix tonight.

The other issue is one of supply. Let’s say you’ve got three Widget companies. One sells Good, Cheap Widgets (but they’re very slow to fill orders and deliver); one sells Good, Fast Widgets (but they’re very expensive) and one sells Cheap, Fast Widgets (but they’re very basic and the lowest quality of the three). Regardless of their production styles, none of them can produce infinite Widgets in finite time; there’s a limit to how many Widgets the population could buy from them at once.

So now down comes the decree that all Widgets have to have a 30-day waiting period. Since before you had to wait 30 days for Good, Cheap Widgets, but you could get the other two kinds in 48 hours, suddenly everyone places their orders with Good & Cheap. Why wouldn’t they? “Fast” is no longer an option. Except that’s more orders than Good & Cheap can fulfill (hey, they can’t re-order supplies any faster, either!), so suddenly there’s a huge back-log. Instead of 30 days, it’s months and months to get a Good & Cheap Widget because there simply aren’t enough.

Now customers are forced into one of two bad situations: Buy Good & Cheap Widgets but wait half a year or more to get them, or buy “Just Good” Widgets (that are neither fast nor cheap) or “Just Cheap” Widgets (that are neither fast nor good). Fixing one axis made literally every option worse.

All it takes is fixing one axis in place, and the whole thing falls apart.

The more flexible a system is, the more robust and resistant to damage it is. The better it can serve the greatest number of varied needs. When architects build skyscrapers, they build in the ability to sway in the wind – because if they can’t sway, they break.

Rigid things break, whether they be physical objects or complex systems. Let things adjust.

I love that phrase, “ahead of its time.” Describing something that’s just too good for society to really grasp it yet, so it languishes in obscurity.

I think all invention is timely in nature. Consider the transistor. One of the greatest inventions ever – and by the way, like all great inventions, you never think of it as such. All the inventions that truly revolutionize society do so by becoming so ubiquitous that you couldn’t even conceive of life without it, so it becomes as invisible to you as the air you breathe.

Anyway, back to the transistor. If you’d invented that in Roman times it would have been useless. But in the 1940s it changed the world. I guarantee you that you couldn’t even imagine a world without them, so pervasive are the effects of those little things.

All invention is reactionary, made to solve a problem that has only existed for five minutes due to a change in our lives brought about by the last invention. We build and improve and build and improve, but timing is everything. A year too late or too early changes the very nature of an idea.

So keep your eyes open! The problem you’re destined to solve with your new idea may not even exist yet – but it will, and that’s the time for you. If you try to force it when it isn’t ready, you’ll be relegated to the book of almost-was called “Ahead Of Its Time.”

“We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”

I’ve seen that mistake play out again and again. Come on a little trip with me and let’s talk about why.

Have you ever heard of the trolley problem? It’s a philosophical thought experiment. There’s a trolley barreling down a track and it’s going to hit and kill 5 people who are tied up in its path. You can’t stop this. But you can pull a lever that redirects the trolley onto a side track where it will hit and kill one person instead of five. Do you do it?

There’s no right or wrong answer here, it’s just a thought experiment to discuss the nature of active versus inactive harm – you see, the answer of “one death versus five deaths” might seem obvious at first, but the subtle second layer is that the first five deaths you had nothing to do with – but if you pull the lever you’re directly responsible for that person’s death.

But let’s look at this from a different angle. Instead of looking through the lens of moral action, let’s look through the lens of societal self-preservation.

Imagine the scenario again, but this time lets add cameras and a crowd. Thousands watching, potentially millions more will see recordings of the terrible event. If you do nothing, 5 people die – but nobody knows who you are. You’re just one person in the crowd, unconnected to this tragedy. But if you rush forward and pull that lever, you save five lives – but you’re branded a murderer, blamed for the one person’s death, your face plastered on every news site.

Changes the calculation somewhat, doesn’t it? Maybe it doesn’t change what, in theory, you should do. But for many people it changes what they would do.

People are often motivated by the desire to be blameless more than by the desire for the best outcomes.

In 2012, my parents’ house was destroyed by the local fire department. Not by a fire; by the fire department. There was a small fire in the corner of the garage; perfectly manageable by a small amount of water. Instead, the fire department soaked the entire house for hours. I don’t know if you’ve ever soaked a house for hours, but… it destroys it.

Why did they do this? Because if they soak the house and it gets destroyed, they don’t get any blame. After all, they did what they were supposed to do. But if they don’t soak the house and by some crazy event the tiny fire actually reignites and spreads to the house, they will get blamed for not doing their jobs. Their motivation wasn’t to save my parents’ house, it was to avoid blame. Whenever someone is forced to make a tactical call between several options, nine times out of ten they’ll choose the option that produces the lowest likelihood of blame for themselves.

I don’t mean to be cynical or overly critical of that fire department in particular. In fact, I understand them completely. People respond to incentives; that’s just the way it is.

How does this relate back to the original quote?

Because in a lot of dire circumstances, the correct thing to do is nothing. Not to panic, not to change, just to do nothing. But even in circumstances where doing nothing is the decision most likely to produce good results, it can also be a decision that bites you hardest in the ass if you happen to roll snake eyes and get the bad result.

So in a crisis, people decide that they just have to do something, even if nothing is the best call, because “doing something” insulates them from blame for the worst result even if it’s actually increasing the likelihood of that result. And once you’ve decided that you have to “do something” not because it’s a good idea, but because action is necessary for optics, you’ll do pretty much anything that looks suitably “decisive.” Hence: “We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”

The hardest thing to do, even (especially!) when it’s the right thing to do, is nothing. “Tactical Nothing” is a really difficult move to pull off – it requires confidence, calm, and a true faith in statistical reasoning. But if you’re focused on the long run, it pays off.

When I was growing up, I had a very unique friend. We’d met in my early teens, and he was a year or two older than me. He was hilarious, street-smart, weird, and a great friend. I also quickly discovered that he was homeless.

He was great at it, though. He’d been living on the streets for years, but “living on the streets” probably conjures the wrong image about him. He never actually slept on the streets, as far as I was aware. Instead, he crashed with people, staying as a guest of one friend or contact after another. He lived with me and my parents for about a two-year stretch while I was in high school.

He had some fantastic “rules” for how to live like this.

Rule 1: Always be valuable. If someone is letting you stay with them for free, make sure they LOVE it. Don’t be a mooch. Every house he ever stayed in was spotless and well-maintained because he’d constantly do chores, clean, fix things, etc. He knew if the question of whether or not it was worth letting him stay ever even crossed the minds of his hosts, he’d failed.

Rule 2: Never be in the way. If you’re a guest of someone’s hospitality, he would say, you should be a ghost. You shouldn’t be able to easily tell that he was living there. He kept his profile extremely low; he’d never leave any of his own stuff anywhere visible, he would never be just lounging in common areas, and even the chores he would do, he’d do while the other residents were at work or school. He kept all of his stuff in a trunk tucked away in the corner of our basement where it wasn’t in anyone’s way, and other than that and his bed he took up virtually no floor space.

Rule 3: Always leave ’em wanting more. He said this was the most important – never wear out your welcome. He’d usually move on right after he’d had a really great, entertaining time with his hosts. He wanted people to remember him fondly, so he always left on high notes. That way if he wandered through their corner of the world again and showed up unexpectedly, he’d be cheered and welcomed.

These strategies worked. Sometimes he would just vanish, and we’d miss him. Then he’d show up on my doorstep a year or two later and we’d be thrilled.

That last rule has a lot of applications, even for those of us that aren’t permanent nomads wandering the country. Your time with various people, groups, organizations – those times will end. It’s natural. But if you want to preserve your reputation, keep thoughts of you positive, and be welcomed into good company again in the future: control those endings. Leave on high notes and on your own terms. Go out with a bang, and leave ’em wanting more.

Let me tell you about my laundry.

I do laundry once a week. It used to take me approximately 40 minutes, once the laundry was out of the dryer, to fold it and put it away. (No, I’m not QUITE weird enough to time myself doing laundry. But I have a playlist of upbeat songs on Spotify to listen to when doing chores, and when I’m done a chore and shut off the music I can see how long it’s been playing. Neat side benefit!)

I figured 40 minutes was too long, so I wanted to shorten it down. I didn’t really pay much attention to “laundry efficiency” prior to this, so there was some definite low-hanging fruit with regards to efficiency gains. Changing one thing turned it from 40 minutes to about 10-15.

What I used to do (40-minute version) was take the clean laundry out of the basket, fold it, and put it in the right stack. Then I’d take all the stacks and put them away. What I do now (10-minute version) is separate everything by the stack it’s going to go in first, then fold all the items of each category in a row. This wasn’t the way I used to do it because it seemed like extra work – an extra step of pre-separating. And that’s true, it was extra work; but only about 60 seconds’ worth, and it made the rest of the task take only about 25% of the time it used to take.

That’s because it’s easier for us to configure our thought processes around one kind of task, activity, or puzzle and then get into the zone than it is to have to do the mental step of first figuring out what kind of question this is, and then answering it.

Here’s a different example: my oldest kid, as part of her current home-school work, has these daily math exercises that are a series of easy problems, but graded on speed. It’s an attempt to make the basic building blocks automatic and reflexive, so they come at her rapid-fire. Once she’s ready though, she can crush it. You can probably imagine doing the same. But imagine that the questions that came at you rapid-fire weren’t just simple math equations. Imagine that it was a jumble – some math equations, some state capitals, some spelling questions, some geometry puzzles, etc. Even if each individual question was on the same overall level of simplicity, having to figure out what kind of question you were answering each time would slow you down dramatically.

Your day-to-day professional “to do” lists can have that effect on you. Often we categorize them based on the types of projects, but maybe we should look at them in terms of the scope instead. For instance, imagine that you have three big accounts you’re working on. For each account, you have to do a bunch of market research, assemble some contact lists, do cold outreach, and prepare a pitch deck. For some people, their to-do list might look like this:

1. Do Johnson Account Market Research
2. Assemble Johnson Account Contact List
3. Send Johnson Account Emails
4. Prep Johnson Account Pitch Deck
5. Do Mattison Account Market Research
6. Assemble Mattison Account Contact List
7. Send Mattison Account Emails
8. Prep Mattison Account Pitch Deck
9. Do Berkly Account Market Research
10. Assemble Berkly Account Contact List
11. Send Berkly Account Emails
12. Prep Berkly Account Pitch Deck

That makes some intuitive sense – get everything done on the first account, then move to the next one. But I posit that you’d actually be better off arranging your day like this:

1. Do Johnson Account Market Research
2. Do Mattison Account Market Research
3. Do Berkly Account Market Research
4. Assemble Johnson Account Contact List
5. Assemble Mattison Account Contact List
6. Assemble Berkly Account Contact List
7. Send Johnson Account Emails
8. Send Mattison Account Emails
9. Send Berkly Account Emails
10. Prep Johnson Account Pitch Deck
11. Prep Mattison Account Pitch Deck
12. Prep Berkly Account Pitch Deck

Note that with the first list, you have to shift mental gears between every task. You have to change your mind’s focus on totally different exercises using totally different skills, again and again. That can really wear you out and disrupt your flow. In the second list, you’re minimizing the number of shifts you need to do. You’re doing a bunch of market research and letting yourself be immersed in the task. Then when it’s done, you’re assembling contact lists and can really get a rhythm going, etc.

When you have to self-manage your time, it’s easy to forget how important “wear and tear” on your focus and attention can be. Give yourself the smoothest flow you can, and watch the tasks get easier.

So let’s say I’ve got an old toy. Some trinket from my youth that I find one day while cleaning out my parents’ attic for them or something. It’s still in fine condition, and I don’t remember it at at all – in other words, it holds no nostalgic or sentimental value to me, though it might be a fun thing for some new kid.

So I decide to sell it. I clean it up, take a few pictures, and post it to whatever site people use to sell stuff like that these days. Let’s say I’m charging $20.

Now, someone contacts me to inquire about the toy. They ask some preliminary questions as to its origin and condition, which I answer truthfully. This person now says something like this:

“Listen, you don’t really need the $20. And you certainly don’t need the toy – you wouldn’t have bought it in a store, you only have it out of more or less dumb luck. So you really should just give it to me.”

(By the way, if you’ve ever sold something online, you know that this happens in some variation like 80% of the time.)

So where’s the flaw in this stranger’s argument? They’re right about the $20 – it won’t make or break me. They’re right that I don’t need nor even want the toy, and I only even have it in my possession due to dumb luck. So I’m convinced! Instead of asking for $20, I’m just going to give it away for free.

But… not to them.

You see, there’s a fundamental difference between the people you sell stuff to and the people you give stuff to for free.

If I sell something for $20, I’ve only got one criteria for who I sell it to – they have to be willing to give me $20. I don’t care about anything else about them. But when I give something away for free, I care a LOT about who the recipient is.

Why? Because selling stuff is self-sustaining. I can theoretically sell an infinite amount of products or services as long as I’m making a profit, because that money will enable me to sustain the provision of a product or service indefinitely. If I’m a farmer and I sell corn, the money I make buys more seed, fertilizer, equipment, labor, etc. – all of which gets me more corn. But if I give the corn away, I’ll quickly run out and the cycle will end. So I have to be extremely careful to not give away more corn than I can afford – and the number of people who want free corn will always exceed who I can provide for in that way.

So if I have 10 ears of corn to give away, and a thousand people want free corn, how do I decide? For most people, they want to be not only altruistic, but effectively altruistic. They want to give where it will do the most good. They want to give those 10 ears of corn to the truly needy, the starving, etc. If you buy an ear, I don’t care about your station or circumstances, but I’m not trying to give corn away to millionaires.

So back to the toy – if I’m going to donate it, I want to donate it to Toys for Tots or a local pediatric ward at a hospital or a needy family or something like that – not just to someone who bugs me about it because they’d rather not pay. If you’re willing to buy it, then your circumstances are largely irrelevant (I say “largely” because I still might just refuse to do business with you if you’re like a Nazi or someone who talks in the theater, etc.).

So the next time someone asks you for something for free – give it some thought. And if you decide to give it away, make sure you let them know who you decide to give it to.

Humans are very easily hoodwinked by ritual, and the ritual surrounding “rules” is perhaps one of our deepest blind spots.

If I said to you, “It’s Tuesday night, so I think you should eat tacos,” then you’d rightly consider that no more binding than if I suggested a song you might like. Not only is it only an opinion, but it’s not even a particularly good one (though tacos are fantastic), and it’s odd that I would even suggest that you adhere to my personal preference. You’d get all that. Maybe tacos would sound like a good idea and you’d take the suggestion and maybe you wouldn’t, but at no point would you think of it as anything deeper than that.

But as soon as people hear, “by law, you have to eat tacos on Tuesdays,” they just do it. Of course; it’s a rule. A law. Most people don’t stop to consider that after you strip away the ceremony surrounding it, a “rule” that you have to eat tacos on Tuesdays is no different than somebody just telling you to do it.

Rules are just suggestions with consequences.

But all decisions have consequences, and all suggestions are made by people, so the only difference between a rule and a suggestion is the salad dressing, so to speak.

Sometimes rules happen to describe good actions. For instance, you shouldn’t murder people. But whether or not you should murder people has nothing to do with whether or not it’s against the law. If you were living in the movie The Purge, murder would still be wrong even on the night that it’s legal.

Sometimes rules happen to describe actions with good consequences. There’s nothing morally wrong with swimming right after you eat, you just might get a painful cramp and have an unpleasant time. But that’s true whether or not a lifeguard or a parent tells it to you – even if there were no rule against it, it might be worth it to wait.

But actions aren’t morally good or have good consequences because of the rules. Which means that the rules themselves aren’t evidence that the rules are good – but that kind of circular logic is pervasive among people of all walks of life.

Here’s an example: let’s say I advocated the full legalization of drugs. Now, you might argue that drugs, if legal, would have a stronger negative impact on society and that’s a reason to keep them illegal. You might argue that their legalization would have a disparate impact on the most vulnerable and thus should be kept off the streets as much as we’re able. You might even argue that the human body is a temple that shouldn’t be sullied by such substances. Whether I agree or disagree with any of those arguments, they’re at least real arguments. But a substantial number of people would in fact say: “Doing drugs is a crime, and therefore it’s bad, and therefore you shouldn’t legalize doing them.”

You see the problem? You’re using the existence of the rule as justification for existence of the rule. The business version of this is the dreaded phrase “but that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

You remember the movie Aladdin? The whole setup of the movie is that the princess has to marry a prince, and the Sultan is all distraught because his daughter keeps rejecting suitors and he’s worried she won’t find a husband by some deadline. Then the whole movie happens, Aladdin becomes a prince and then subsequently stops being one for some reason, and then he and the princess (who have of course fallen in love) are very upset because they can’t be wed.

And then the Sultan just has this epiphany where he says (I’m not kidding) “Wait a minute, I’m the Sultan, these rules are literally dictated by me and me alone, so I’m just going to say you can marry whoever you want.” That’s it! Whole movie solved, events of the actual plot unnecessary.

That’s all of life! Here’s the thing about most rules. Not all, but most rules fall into one of two categories:

1. Rules that made sense for a particular time, place, people and set of circumstances, but have persisted far beyond their appropriate scope due to inertia or bureaucracy or something like that.
2. Rules that even originally were made to further a particular person’s or group’s agenda and never represented an attempt to codify good morals or good consequences into easy instructions.

It’s really rare for a rule to be both Good and Timeless. Which means you should take them for what they are – suggestions. Calibrate your moral and intellectual compass elsewhere, and make your own decisions.

Here is one of my core beliefs: specialization is good. You shouldn’t try to be able to do everything; you should focus on developing your core strengths as much as possible and outsource or delegate most of everything else.

However, there’s a dark side to that philosophy. Once you adopt the mantra that you should be good at your “thing” and not worry too much about trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, you can then become too dismissive of things you aren’t good at.

Just because you aren’t good at something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever do it.

First, your life doesn’t have to be an endless pursuit of efficiency. I’m not a skilled auto mechanic; if something were wrong with my car, the best thing for me to do would be to pay money to a specialist to have it fixed. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t ever tinker around with my car. It can be fun to learn things, and it can still be valuable – even moving from “totally ignorant” to “basic knowledge” can help you interact with experts better, saving time and money all around.

But it’s also just good for the soul to recognize that the world is full of things to be good at, and you won’t be good at all of them. It gives you a deeper appreciation of your fellow humans and their myriad skills and talents.

Plus, botching stuff on a regular basis both keeps you humble and gives you a lot of information about the world. The best ideas come from disasters.

So I still believe that when it comes to carving out your place in the world, it’s good to find the thing you’re good at and dive in. When you’re serious about personal development and in that mental space, you should be spending that time improving your core strengths, not trying to overcome every little thing you’re not good at. But when you’re just living your life – in leisure, relaxing, exploring the universe – be eager to lose. Lose graciously, and watch the world pour information and inspiration onto you that you can take back with you to your tower of victory, to build it even higher.

What would you talk about if you had a blank check for somebody’s attention? Imagine they weren’t anybody who would make major changes based on your conversation, but just someone who was genuinely interested in whatever you wanted to talk about. What would you pick?

That question might be challenging for you. Even if it’s easy, I’m guessing you don’t always choose to talk about that thing. We make so many other choices when we do have someone’s attention – so many other agendas to our conversations. So rarely do we just talk about the thing we care about.

Sometimes we have good reasons – there’s a time and a place for everything, after all. But sometimes we have bad reasons, too, like thinking that the other person doesn’t want to hear about the thing we’re passionate about. But that’s all the more reason to do it! Seek out people who share your passions, and if that means boring a few people who don’t along the way, they’ll survive. So will you.

But there’s an even worse reason to not talk about the thing you care so deeply about. Some people, for reasons I’ll never understand, want to keep their passions a secret. They have something they care about more than anything in the world, and they don’t want to share it with anyone.

For these people, it’s not about fear of rejection or social anxiety. It’s the legitimate belief on their part that their passion will become less valuable, less special somehow, if other people become passionate about it as well. If you’ve ever scoffed at someone (even in your own head) who didn’t already share your knowledge, even as they were asking you about the subject, then you were being exactly this kind of weird gatekeeper.

I hope you’ve never done that, but I’m sure you’ve encountered someone else who has. Hoarding knowledge doesn’t make you special, and information and passion can’t be diluted. They’re only amplified through sharing.

Take the leap, assume people are interested, and give them everything you’ve got.