If you’re going to be an iconoclast, be a nice iconoclast.

John Darnielle, the front-man (and sometimes only-man) for The Mountain Goats, says that the reason he doesn’t curse in his lyrics is because his lyrics are controversial enough without giving people an additional reason to dismiss him out of hand. That’s a good lesson for anyone who likes to be able to speak controversially, at any time.

Rage and spit and fire and brimstone don’t convince anybody. They might intimidate people into disagreeing with you silently instead of publicly, but disagree with you they still shall – and in fact, probably more vehemently than before. And you’ll have no ability to maneuver that disagreement because you won’t even know it.

Tactics of rhetoric like screaming and flailing and getting all fired up can make people who already agree with you do so more fervently, or whip them into a particular course of action. But if your goal is to sway, then remember that swaying is an inherently gentle act.

The most controversial voice in the room always should be the calmest. Your first debate is with your own emotions, and you have to win in order to proceed to the next round. Truth and wisdom alone have gotten plenty of people stoned to death. If you want to be able to speak your mind, potentially convince people, and remain immune to the worst of the fates of the pariah – then be nice.

There’s a pretty funny joke I’ve heard a few variations of. Apologies if you’ve heard it before, but here it is:

This is the transcript of an actual radio conversation between a US naval ship and Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland.

US Ship: Please divert your course 0.5 degrees to the south to avoid a collision.

CND reply: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.

US Ship: This is the Captain of a US Navy Ship. I say again, divert your course.

CND reply: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course!

US Ship: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS CORAL SEA, WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE US NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW!!

CND reply: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

Hahaha! Yeah, it’s cheesy, but that joke makes me smile. I think it’s clever. I also think it’s wise.

In life, you’re the only battleship. Everyone else is a lighthouse. You can get all mad and blustery and indignant about other people not getting out of your way, but that’s just going to result in a lot of collisions.

Have you ever been walking towards a street you need to cross, and at the same time a car is headed down that street? You see each other, and there’s some awkward shuffling as each person tries to figure out who’s going and everyone gets slowed down as a result? I have a trick for that. When I see the car approaching, I turn and walk in a different direction. The driver will no longer see me as potentially crossing their path and they’ll just drive on by. I won’t get two steps out of my normal path before the car is passed and I can just cross the street, saving us both about 30 seconds. I don’t try to affect the other person’s behavior at all. They’re the lighthouse; I change course.

People almost never change their behavior without stimuli. So if you have a neighbor that does something that annoys you, it’s pretty silly of you to expect them to change. If they’ve let their dog bark at 11 PM every night for six years, they’re not going to suddenly now realize that it’s pretty rude of them to do so. You, only you, can create change. You can create change by going over and having a nice talk with your neighbor or you can create change by soundproofing your own house, but in either case you have to be the one to act.

The lighthouse isn’t going to move.

“If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”

There are few things in this world with a payoff as great as cultivating the people who influence you. Every single person you interact with will have some effect on you, even if you’re an incredibly stalwart person. That means that who you give the most influence to is vitally important.

The question of whether or not you’d jump off a bridge if all your friends did is entirely dependent on the quality of your circle of friends.

If your friends are all savvy, intelligent, and competent people, and ALL of them jump off a bridge, then there might be something to it. It’s not about blind faith in others! Those friends aren’t random – you chose them, and if you do a good job in that choosing then you can use that as a proxy for later decisions such as whether to trust their decisions to leap off of things.

Conversely, lessons so often taught on after-school television specials about not letting your friends dictate your behavior are really lessons about picking better friends. If you need to constantly choose between your own moral compass and the influence of your peers, then your peers might just be terrible.

Contrary to what you might think, this doesn’t mean I advocate an echo chamber or a circle of “yes men/women.” Quite the opposite! If your chosen peer group is filled with smart, savvy and competent people then you can actually feel more confident seeking out contrary opinions and views and giving them fair consideration. You won’t have to worry as much that some silver-tongued influence will get the better of your higher reasoning with emotional appeals, because you’ll have forums to discuss these things with other rational minds.

It’s no coincidence that demagogues so often find the chronically isolated among their most devout followers. No matter how smart and stalwart we are, none of us are immune to emotional bias or weakness of reasoning on occasion. We all have our bad days. If you don’t have a circle of minds to connect to your own that you trust and value, then a “bad day” can be an open gate for every bad idea that floats your way. But if you have ten other strong minds that influence you, that you’ve learned to trust over time and value their input? Then even if you get caught up in a bad idea, you have tethers.

If I want to talk someone into jumping off a bridge, all I have to do is catch them at the right (wrong) moment. If I want to convince a group of ten to do the same, they’d have to simultaneously be experiencing the sort of terrible emotional strain that would make them susceptible to that kind of influence, and that’s significantly less likely.

Whether they’re your close friends, certain family members, professional peers, or even a salon of thinkers you cultivate and interact with solely for this reason, it’s a good thing to have a regular forum of ideas.

Without it, you’re closer to the edge of the bridge than you might think.

I had an interesting conversation about relative suffering the other day, and I’ve been thinking about it since. No one lives a perfectly charmed life, and everyone will endure suffering at some point. Comparing your suffering to others is rarely healthy or helpful.

For instance, if you’ve lost a loved one and you’re grieving, it probably doesn’t help even one little bit to learn of someone else who lost two loved ones. Even if there were some sort of objective measure of pain and grief (which of course there is not), the person who lost two people doesn’t necessarily suffer more than the person who lost one.

I think grief and mourning are actually far more binary than we often think; or if not fully binary (i.e. grieving or not with no relevant degree of intensity), then at least the spectrum of feeling is narrower than we think. And that’s where perspective helps us – not to rank ourselves on some vast bell curve of pain and loss, but to help us recognize when grief isn’t appropriate at all.

Some of this is of course subjective – I won’t tell someone not to grieve over a lost pet even if I don’t personally do that. But it means if the thing that’s causing you abject grief is being out of chocolate milk, it may do well to know what causes suffering in others in order to have a little perspective.

And if, in chasing perspective, you also gain sympathy – so much the better.

Every aspect of your life can be stripped for parts to build some other aspect, if you need to. You’ll often do this inadvertently, but without direction it can be sloppy and destructive. You can get much better at it by doing it intentionally.

Imagine two of your friends, each in a relationship. The relationships aren’t working out, and both of your friends decide to end their relationships with their respective partners. One of them, let’s say Kim, ends their relationship maturely. Kim has a conversation, treats their now ex with respect, and quashes rumors among friends by being transparent (while still remaining respectful of their ex’s privacy, of course). They split up any mutual possessions and maintain friendships.

Now picture the other friend, Pat. Pat decides to make this into A Thing ™. Pat dumps the other person in a big blowup fight, trashes them publicly, creates divides among friends. Pat goes into hysterics at the mention of any of the places they used to go together and throws away or burns all the mutual possessions.

Kim has clearly done a better job salvaging the useful bits of that part of their life. Those bits can be turned into something else very easily! Lots of friends, a good network of communication, even some nice outfits that they’ve cultivated. They’re more ready to date again sooner, because they recycle well – not to mention just treating someone else more nicely.

Pat has to get all new stuff. A new “dating circle,” new places to eat and other date locations, etc.

This is everything in your life! When you leave a job, you want to make sure you’re keeping your network, your skills, your reputation, maybe even your stapler. When you move, you don’t just throw everything away and buy new stuff when you get there. (Note – it’s totally okay to SELL everything and buy new stuff, especially if it makes the move easier! But waste not, want not.)

Use your life efficiently. Some things are hard to build. Even if they reach a point where they no longer serve your goals and aspirations, you can – and should – use all that you can from what you’ve made.

You’ve heard the story of the tortoise & the hare, I’m sure. Big race, rabbit is a lock, turtle comes from behind because he never gives up, etc.

I really dislike how this story is told.

Every time you hear this story, its target audience appears to be tortoises. In other words, this story is always told as advice to never give up and keep chugging along, because then you’ll win!

Not only is that kind of silly advice, but it misses out on the amazing advice that this story actually holds if told correctly.

See, “slow and steady” might accomplish goals, but it doesn’t actually win races. “Slow and steady” is great advice from the standpoint of personal improvement. If you’re trying to lose weight, don’t worry about how fast you’re doing it – slow and steady is great advice. Lose weight in a healthy way, keep consistent, and you’ll get there.

But races involve other people. And in an actual race between a tortoise and a hare, the hare is going to win. Maybe you could tell this story as a sort of marathon-versus-sprint story, where “slow and steady” works because the turtle is a better distance runner than the rabbit or something, but that’s not the story at all. The real story contains a fantastic lesson, but it never seems to get emphasized.

The real moral of this story, the incredible value it contains, is this:

“Don’t blow an early advantage by being arrogant and lazy.”

That’s the power of this story. The tortoise didn’t win; the hare lost. The hare didn’t lose because of some inherent quality of the tortoise, either – the hare lost because it had a strong lead and took a nap. Arrogance and laziness lost that race. It had nothing to do with “slow and steady” versus quick. This lesson that if you just go “slow and steady” you’ll win every race is hogwash.

You’ll win every race you’re capable of winning, if you never get cocky and take naps while you’re still running.

Don’t mistake “being in the lead” with “already won.” This story should be told to hares, not to tortoises. If you tell this story to a tortoise, you’re saying “the other person might be better than you in the qualities measured by this particular competition, but if you just keep plugging away you’ll win anyway.” Ridiculous! If you’re the tortoise, you win only if the hare messes up.

So the lesson is: if you’re the hare, don’t mess up. And if you’re the tortoise, become the hare. You win the race by improving, not by just doing the same old thing over and over and hoping for a mistake from your superior competition.

And therein lies the deeper, perhaps truer meaning. Unlike the characters in the story, we’re none of us trapped in the skin of a hare nor a tortoise. We can be either, each of us, and we can change over time. We can start the race as a tortoise but choose to put in the work to become a hare. And once we’re a hare, we can remember the lessons of this story, and we can do it all – we can be good at what we do, and simultaneously avoid the arrogance and laziness that threatens to unseat us.

Quick and steady wins the race.

Earlier this week I had a day that didn’t go so well. I’ll spare you the unimportant details, but at the end of the day I looked back and was deeply unsatisfied.

I did something different with that feeling than I normally do.

Normally, when I feel that particular feeling, I try to salvage. I push myself, work on something, commit to not sleeping until I’ve accomplished something that makes the day a win overall. Sometimes that actually works and often it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t work, it makes things far worse.

So instead, this time, I just said to myself: “Take the loss. It’s one day. Get some sleep.” I didn’t try to work myself into a stupor to salvage it. And perhaps even more importantly, I didn’t say “I’ll work twice as hard tomorrow to make up for it.” That’s rarely healthy and is a good way to create a line of dominoes.

I woke up the next morning feeling great. And I had a great day.

I’m writing this because I’m sure that a single win like that won’t totally change my habits. I’m sure the impulse will still be there, the next time I have a bad day, to try to grind into the wee hours trying to figure out some way to scrape up a victory.

But writing this is the first step to reminding myself to cut my poor bones a little slack sometimes, too.

The concept of the “secret menu” fascinates me. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it has a few layers. The most basic version is that sometimes a particular restaurant (usually a chain/franchise) has certain items that they have the capacity to make, but that they don’t advertise (or don’t advertise broadly). Starbucks was probably the most famous example of this, but plenty of other restaurants have followed suit.

There’s a lot of benefit to doing this seemingly weird thing. First off, overly-complex menus of choices are daunting. You really hurt your efficiency if your customers can choose from hundreds of different options. You want most people to just know the most basic items, because you’ll sell a lot of those and be quick. But having several more complex things on a “secret menu” can also help capture additional demographics – foodies and the like, plus people who just love fun secrets and scavenger hunts and things like that.

Even outside of the restaurant industry though, it’s really interesting to look at the things that a company would offer to its customers and clients but not directly advertise. We even have a few of these at my work, and it’s absolutely a good idea.

Why would it be a good idea to hide certain things you can do? For one, because complexity isn’t your friend. Most of the “secret menu” items are extremely narrow, niche and/or conditional, so they won’t apply to 99% of customers. Making a potential customer read all of them as they’re electing to work with you is pointless – and can even work against you. Instead, our internal experts know all of them, and have them in their back pocket if a client expresses a particular hardship that the “secret menu” service could solve.

If you’re a professional landscaper but you also happen to know how to safely transport bees from one hive to another, it doesn’t make sense to advertise the bee-transportation services heavily. First off, most of your main clients won’t have bee-hives, so it’s wasted space. Second, if you advertise it then many potential landscaping clients may incorrectly assume that you exclusively (or at least primarily) work with people with beehives, and that could severely limit your customer base. Lastly, you might only have the capacity to do that once in a while, so while you don’t mind doing it for the odd customer here and there that needs it, you don’t really want to be doing it all the time. In this case, you might have all the tools needed to do the task and even a set price and contract made up for it, but you don’t advertise it. But if a landscaping client happens to mention that as they’re re-doing their property they’d also love to find someone to relocate their hive – boom, you’re on it.

Whatever you do, it’s definitely important to remember that your simplest ‘core offering’ is probably the right thing to lean on as a company brand. It can be clear and tell your story best. If they need something else you can be prepared to say “yes!” But you don’t need to tell someone in advance every single way you might do so.

The fully aligned system of your mind, body and spirit is an infrastructure. And like all infrastructures designed to support activity, it has maximum stress capacities in various conditions and for various types of strain.

It’s like a bridge. Imagine a bridge with a one-ton weight capacity. If more than a ton of cars are on the bridge at once, the bridge is very likely to collapse.

And here’s the thing: it does not matter one bit whether those cars are part of a parade or a funeral procession.

In other words, whether something is “good” or “bad,” whether it’s “happy” or “sad;” these things don’t really affect whether or not they’re stressful.

But we, both as individuals and as a culture at large, tend to minimize the right to feel stressed when the things causing the stress are good. If your spouse loses their job, your basement floods, your dog gets sick and your car breaks down all in the same week, people are quick to show their support for you and encourage you to take some time to yourself. Maybe a day off, someone brings you soup, that sort of thing.

But “happy stress” can sometimes be even more straining because you’re sort of just told to “suck it up.” Heck, you probably even tell yourself that – I know I do. Got a new promotion, kids get a new puppy, big trip coming up, etc. – it’s still stress, but because it stems from good things we don’t think we’re allowed to be overwhelmed.

We ignore early warning signs. We work harder to fight through it. We don’t take care of ourselves, because the circumstances are “good.” But you can still hit a wall. You can still put so much pressure on the infrastructure that it starts to crack. Maybe that looks like making poor or impulsive choices. Maybe it looks like ignoring valuable but less exciting or pressing things. Whatever it is, it can still be harmful.

Whether things are good or bad overall, take care of yourself. It’s okay to take a day off and be calm, even if all the other days are good ones – sometimes they can just be a lot and that’s fine to acknowledge.