From an economic standpoint, debt has some important functions. And from a psychological standpoint, sometimes treating yourself to something you want can make you feel good.

But combining the two is a recipe for disaster.

If you want to maximize the happiness you get from a monetary expenditure, then save up for it. You’ll maximize “anticipation happiness,” you’ll feel a sense of earned pride, and your actual purchases will be more sensible. If you splurge on a new widget (and that’s fine to do here and there!), but put it on your credit card – now you’re stuck paying money for nothing for however long it takes to pay it off, because from the perspective of your dumb lizard brain (the thing you were satisfying with the splurge in the first place) you already have it now, so money is just going down the drain.

Debt is fine as a way of gaining assets and smoothing out income curves. It has its place as a leverage and investment tool. But the point of “splurging” is to give yourself a quick shot of happy chemicals, and doing that on a credit card is really close to just doing drugs. You’re not just trading away money for happiness, you’re trading away long-term happiness for short-term happiness.

The old adage of “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is something I’ve actually found to be true. Unlike many folksy aphorisms that I delight in dismantling, this one has proven accurate to me time and again.

So use it to your advantage!

Here’s how – limit your tools to healthy ones. Let me give you an example: let’s say you have a nasty habit of dealing with stress via drinking. If alcohol is available to you and you’ve adopted that as your “tool,” then every problem will look like a reason to drink. But if instead you remove the alcohol and start building a habit of dealing with stress by running a half mile, then every stressful situation will start looking like a reason to run.

I do that with this very blog. My co-workers joke about it. Some interesting discussion or problem will come up at work and I’ll get a certain look in my eyes and at least someone will say, “he just found today’s blog post.” And it’s true! Because this blog is, in many ways, my “hammer,” then everything looks like a good topic for a blog post. That’s healthy for me – a natural channel.

If your tools are rage or alcohol or frustration or quitting, then everything that happens to you will fit into the framework you’ve built around those tools. They’re not just solutions, they’re lenses through which you view the problem itself. Change your lens, and the same events in your life will fit themselves into different frameworks.

I read a total of six books to my kids today, in various combinations. They’re voracious consumers of the written word, all of them. They can all, to varying degrees of proficiency, read on their own – but they still pile onto my lap or around my feet to be read to, and I’m grateful for it.

I love reading out loud. I’m super good at it, too – I do the voices and everything! I know when to dive into the story and let it wash over them, and when to pause and ask them to talk about what we’re reading and share their thoughts and feelings. (Of course, my youngest kid’s thoughts and feelings are mostly him excitedly pointing to words he recognizes and shouting them, but the older two are surprisingly nuanced for their ages.)

My thoughts are often consumed by worry about what to teach my children. How to teach it. Whether I’m teaching it well enough. What might happen if I don’t.

And then, we have days where I’m just shocked at how much they already know. How many little details they already own, and what beautiful big pictures they already know how to paint. My three-year-old extrapolates and predicts behaviors, filling in characters’ reactions in advance even in stories she doesn’t know. My eight-year-old is inventing riddles and puzzles and jokes, already more clever with wordplay than I was at her age (and quite a bit older). Even my youngest can pick up books that he clearly can’t read, but can turn to each page and recite it from memory based on only one or two times it’s been read to him. And he does so with great enthusiasm.

The best thing you can do for your kids isn’t to teach them. It’s to make it easy, and enjoyable, for them to learn. Give them tools. Let them have books and paper and yes, screens. Show them how to use those things to find knowledge and master its building blocks.

And when they want you to read to them, say yes. And do the voices.

A story can’t exist independently of the audience. They are a part of what you’re saying. To some extent you can decide who you want your audience to be, but once you’ve decided, you’ve also given them some power over your narrative.

Your audience becomes the currents in which you swim. And you can definitely swim with or against the currents, with all the attendant effects.

I mentioned to my boss today that I disliked a naming convention used for some of our services. She agreed, so I asked why we didn’t change it. She said: “Because we didn’t name it based on what we liked. We named it based on what our target audience searches for and expects. We can name it whatever we like, but if we buck expectations too much then people won’t be able to find us. Better to let them find us with the words they expect us to use, and then differentiate and explain better once we have their attention.”

You might want to tell a different story than what’s expected. You may want to create a vehicle that’s so innovative that you don’t even want to call it a “car” anymore. But if it has four wheels and you drive around in it, and you don’t call it a car, you’re going to be swimming upstream. The audience you want has some power over your narrative, and that’s the trade you have to make to even have an audience.

Choose the right balance for you between the story you want to tell and the audience you want to hear it.

Focus is the ability to put effective action towards one thing in concentrations sufficient to accomplish a goal that can’t be accomplished with the same overall level of action all spread out.

If you dump a bucket of water onto a sheet of metal, it won’t do a thing. But waterjets can cut through sheets of metal like butter – the difference is focus.

Everyone’s ability to focus is different, and I think a lot of problems are caused by misaligning your level of focus capability. We take on too much (or even too little) and don’t align focus correctly. How do we do that?

I’m going to continue to use the analogy of the waterjet. Using that analogy, we can understand focus to have three components: Intensity, Spread (or “Horizontal Focus“) and Depth (or “Vertical Focus“).

Intensity is the jet itself. How narrow of an area can you concentrate that water down to? This is different for everyone, but the ability to block out the external and really get the water down to a tight point is what allows it to cut metal. You don’t get anywhere by splashing around. This is the easiest concept to understand, so I won’t dwell on it – but focusing more is obviously more effective.

Spread is like thinking about how many waterjets are fed from the same line. Two won’t be as intense as one – but you might not lose much. If you have plenty of water pressure, two jets might each cut through the same metal as one, and now you’re twice as effective. Likewise, if you have plenty of energy to give and a tight focus, you might be able to focus on two different areas of your life with efficiency. Maybe even three, four, five. But probably never ten, certainly never twenty. The exact number differs by person, but this is essentially how many plates you can keep spinning in your life. If you find that you can’t maintain a successful career, a successful marriage, a healthy body and an active social life – then guess what, four jets is too many for you. You’ve got to cut it down.

Depth is, quite simply, how much water is in the tank. Regardless of how intensely you can cut, or how many sheets you can cut at once – how long can you do it? Some people are incredibly intense, able to go “all in” on an area of improvement – or maybe more than one – but always burn out after six months. They never stick to it. Maybe they have high Intensity and even high Spread/Horizontal Focus, but they lack Depth/Vertical Focus.

So, it’s a simple set of statistics: everyone has a level of How Intensely They Can Focus, plus a Maximum Number of Things They Can Effectively Focus On, plus a Maximum Duration of Effective Focus.

I have high Intensity, high Depth, low Spread. I can focus very intently, and I can do so for long periods of my life to build habits and routines. But I can’t pick more than one or two focus areas in my life before the machine starts to stall. I’ve met people with different stats – people with medium Intensity, low Depth, and high Spread, for instance, are excellent short-term multitaskers but tend to revert to their baseline life after a while. Or people with low Intensity, high Depth, low Spread – these are the people that are excellent at one particular thing, master it, but don’t tend to want to do much else or move out of their comfort zones.

If you want to be successful – however you define it – you need to operate within the realistic framework of your own waterjet. You need to know how far is “spreading yourself too thin,” how much intensity will burn you out before it accomplishes anything, and when you might be “biting off more than you can chew” by taking on projects whose timeframes exceed your depth.

If you stay where you have full power, you can accomplish incredible things. But one of the first stages to successful planning is to know your equipment.

There is something people do that I don’t much care for. It happens in some workplaces, in some relationships, in some statehouses. In any given corner of life or society, you can find someone who is employing the “99% Bad” strategy.

What is that? It’s when you find the worst example you can find of someone else’s behavior for which said person was not appropriately punished, and then you do something that’s just a tiny bit not-as-bad as that and use the original behavior to justify yours. As if whatever you do is totally beyond reproach just because someone else did something 1% worse and didn’t suffer karmic realignment for it.

Oh, the person you’re dating refuses to wash any dishes? So you do something slightly less bad, like wash socks but nothing else in the laundry hamper. Or a co-worker shows up an hour late and gets away with it, so you show up 59 minutes late and if anyone says anything you whine “but Bob was an hour late yesterday and no one said anything to him!” Or, probably like a bajillion political examples that I don’t need to specifiy.

But the point is – your goal in life shouldn’t be to emulate 99% of the most toxic elements in your life. It should be to remove them entirely while maintaining your own honor and dignity. If you have a partner that refuses to contribute to the household, have a discussion with them and if you must, find a new partner. If a coworker is late and you don’t like how it’s handled, voice that concern – but do so while you’re early, not while you’re almost as late. If you have to find a new job, do it.

Don’t engage in this race to see how bad you can be without being the literal worst, as if the existence of even one person worse than you is justification for anything you want to do. Don’t seek out one worse person. Live your life so that you can’t find one better.

Sometimes, you need help. And sometimes, because humans are imperfect, you get help in a way that doesn’t really help you.

This has probably happened to you more than once, and if you really think back you may even realize that you’ve been the source of that unwanted help once or twice in your life. I know I have – despite my best intentions, sometimes the thing I offer isn’t what the person needs.

But here’s the thing – take the help. Be gracious at the offer. Because often one of the conditions for getting the help you do need is to show gratitude for all the help that’s offered.

Think back to an opinion you once held that you now strongly disagree with.

Can you? I suspect that a non-zero number of people might have trouble with this. Some people go their entire lives without a substantial change of mind. Others do experience such a change, but later convince themselves that they have not; they fool themselves into thinking they’ve always been as wise as they now imagine themselves to be. If this is your first hurdle, you won’t reach another. If you can’t think of an opinion you no longer hold, you should find some of your current ones to shed – I guarantee you that some have gone sour while you weren’t paying attention.

If you can recall such an opinion, don’t worry about why you once held it – consider instead why you no longer do. Was it gradual? Did it simply come of aging and experiencing? Or was there a short sharp shock that knocked it loose and made you realize you needed to change? Or perhaps – even more rare – did someone convince you that your opinion was worth adjusting?

Let that particular experience wash over you in your memory. How it felt to change. We don’t like it, generally. The reason people erase the memory of the change of opinion is that changing means admitting a past error, and some people don’t even like to do that. But that’s exactly why we should get used to the idea. So that we’re more comfortable with it, and able to drive that experience around with proficiency when it’s needed. If there are indeed winds of change, don’t run indoors to avoid them. Get a kite. Heck, get a hang glider! Steering to a better place is better than being blown down.

Happy Birthday!

Hey, maybe it’s not your birthday. But if you read this blog every day, you can always bookmark this one and come back to it when it is your birthday and read it then. Or you could send this to someone whose birthday is today!

But since I don’t know if it’s any particular person’s birthday today, why mention it? Because personal holidays are awesome, and your birthday is usually the first one you get. A personal holiday is any meaningful anniversary that matters to you, but not to the larger society in which you live. The more personal and the more deliberate, the more meaningful.

Your birthday is mostly random and you certainly didn’t choose it, but I still think it’s more meaningful than, say, New Year’s Day. Because it’s yours, and you get to define more of what it means. You pick the rituals and ceremonies used to celebrate it. You can choose to ignore it without societal repercussions. How much it bends someone else’s life will be correlated with how much they know and care about you, specifically. These are all good things.

You can go even further – and you should! Mark days that are important to you, and celebrate them. Put big milestones and accomplishments on your calendar, and turn them into holidays that you celebrate every year. Wish yourself a happy birthday, a happy first-time-living-on-your-own day, a Doctorate-Day, the Annual Feast of the Longest Hike I Ever Took. Whatever they are, your life is a celebration, and you deserve to celebrate it however you wish.

We never truly have a clean slate. I think that the assumption that we do affects our ability to plan and set goals negatively.

While every day is a new day and every year is a new year, the starting conditions for each are set by the days and years before. There’s no “base level” that gets returned to.

So use that to your advantage! Don’t try to build an empire on an empty plain, because you don’t have an empty plain. You have the lasting monuments and crumbling ruins of the empires of yesterday and yesteryear.

Knowing that, pick an area and improve it. Each day, week, month, year. Take one aspect and say “this thing will be better.” Keep going. Sisyphus without the boulder. There’s no top of the mountain, but there is always up.