Okay, get ready for a super, SUPER geeky post.

One of the many, many Star Trek spin-off shows was called Star Trek: Voyager. It had a really neat concept, several really amazing actors, and was generally a terrible show. But I’m not going to talk about how terrible it was, I’m just going to talk about the central concept.

The background of the show is that a starship and it’s crew get thrown to the other end of the galaxy by The Plot Monster, and then they have to just travel back the normal way. The normal way will take about seventy years. That’s obviously an issue, but they approach it in a uniquely genre-savvy way: the captain basically says, “Look, it’s a weird sci-fi universe we live in, and all sorts of weird stuff happens all the time, so we’ll just head in the direction of home and every time we encounter some weird other plot device that lets us shave a little time off the trip, we’ll take it. And it’ll add up and we’ll get home.”

(By the way, despite the overall lack of quality on the show itself, that concept is so incredibly great with it’s meta nods at the genre that it deserved some sort of award all by itself. It’s a shame there’s no Emmy for “Great Idea, Poorly Executed.”)

But anyway, there’s a really tremendous lesson there. If you pick a long-term goal and you advance towards it, life is going to happen in the meantime. Lots of events will occur. Some of them will be obstacles, and will hinder and distract you – or at least conspire to. Some will be shortcuts and wormholes that give you a boost towards your goal.

In that sense, a single-minded determination can actually work against you. If Captain Janeway had said “Look, we have to get home, nothing else matters, so ignore everything else we pass. Turn off the sensors, turn off the communicators, and everyone get comfortable,” then the trip would have taken 70 years and most of the crew would be dead before they ever got home. Yes, some things they encountered made (or could have made) the trip longer; dangers and diversions. But proper navigation – through life or through space – involves analyzing each of those events.

Obstacle or opportunity?

A clear vision of where you want to go is essential for this analysis. It’s impossible to tell if something is a help or a hindrance if you don’t know where you’re trying to go. But even if you know where you want to go, you can’t just ignore the journey. Not just because you should stop and smell the roses (even though you should), but because the journey itself will provide its own help if you pay attention, and separate the good from the bumps.

When a particular tragedy or disaster is bad enough, you can feel a deep sense of internal guilt or even externally-imposed shame for trying to find the silver lining. It’s as if certain times are so dark that no light is permitted; you must dedicate every emotional receptor to experiencing the pain, sparing none for even a spark of joy.

I reject that notion.

I think it’s important to pay tragedy the pain it’s due. I think it’s important to feel and acknowledge loss. But in those darkest times, that’s exactly when it’s most important that you find any tiny shred of positivity. That’s the rope to pull you out of the hole.

Don’t be flippant. Don’t be callous. But it is absolutely okay – good, even – to allow yourself the comfort of small miracles.

And don’t judge others for them! Many of us have had very bad years. But if someone has found a small positive within it, don’t begrudge them. Don’t make remarks like “oh well, I’m glad at least YOU made out great in a global pandemic, that makes it all worth it.” People need moments of hope. Don’t dump on them when they get them, especially when they’re few and far between.

If surrounding you are 359 degrees of darkness and 1 degree of light, it’s good to turn your face towards that one ray of hope. That’s the direction you want to walk, after all.

A few people I know have a small tradition where whenever something really, really bad is happening, they’ll look for some incredibly minor but positive result, and then they’ll all enthusiastically yell “Upside!” They might be rushing someone to the hospital, but then after they’ve gotten them safely inside someone will say “hey, that really good Mexican place is right near here,” and then they’ll all yell “Upside!” It puts a smile on their faces, chases away the darkness a little. Only a callous jerk would accuse them of wanting the hospital trip just to get a chance to visit an otherwise inconvenient restaurant. But if you can build up a little resistance to the crushing weight of despair that can be brought on by grave enough tragedies, I consider that a very good thing.

An upside.

I think it’s okay – good, even – to expect more from yourself than from other people.

An easy mental trap to fall into: take all the things you do because you want to, and then blame or condemn anyone else who doesn’t do those things. People fall into this trap frequently. A common example: you text or call your friends frequently to stay in touch, because you consider that to be something that good friends do. Not everyone is good at that, so you end up getting mad at your friends that don’t reach out frequently.

But that’s just imposing your exact, nuanced worldview onto every other person. People have their own lives and their own motivations and their own moral values, and those won’t always translate into the exact set of actions you would take. In fact, that will never happen.

For good or ill, I expect pretty much nothing from every other human. I never expect anyone else to ever voluntarily take an action that might benefit me in any way. It’s a pleasant surprise when it happens, but largely I treat the world as something I have to rise above. I think it’s better to be pleasantly surprised by a kindness than to be constantly disappointed.

But that doesn’t give me an excuse to act as I expect the rest of the world to act. I can, and do, hold myself to a higher standard. I rarely give advice, because other people need to find their own way most of the time. So even though I have a set of principles by which I live, and I might want to think that everyone would be better off if they also lived by them, I wouldn’t try to impose it. I’ll answer if asked, I’ll write my posts, but I will never judge nor expect. It’s difficult enough to run one life.

The difference between achieving a particular goal and not is often just a matter of organizing and structuring the activities you’re already doing.

Every once in a while someone will comment on the fact that I write here every day, along with a sort of sentiment that they couldn’t do the same. But in almost every one of those cases, that person already writes something every day!

I can almost guarantee that you write something every day. Social media posts or comments, text messages, work emails. In some capacity, you’re probably typing words onto a screen at least once between each time you wake up and each time you sleep.

Deciding to do that in a slightly different context is all it takes.

This is true of a lot of things you might want to do! You’re already moving and lifting things. You’re already taking money from one place and putting it in another. You’re already buying food. The actions themselves aren’t alien to you – they only haven’t become exercise routines, saving regimens, and a healthier diet because you haven’t organized them as such.

Just a little trick for you today – train yourself to make certain kinds of mistakes automatically.

Train yourself to guess too high when estimating how many calories are in a piece of food you want to eat. Train yourself to ask the question, and be wrong. Not by a wide margin, but enough.

Train yourself to think that things will take a little longer than they do. Tell yourself “the round trip to the grocery store takes 2 hours” even if that’s a little high.

Train yourself to guess that things are more expensive than they are.

Most people chronically underestimate those things. They have subconscious, motivated reasoning – they want to believe that the desert they’re about to eat is fewer calories, or that they have time to squeeze in a trip to the nail salon, or that they’re not really spending that much on their shopping. They want to believe it, so they do – and then they’ve overindulged, or are late and stressed, or over budget, or whatever.

Instead, deliberately over-estimate. Round up, and then round up again. And repeat the claim in your mind many times. When you know it’s wrong, act as if it’s true. Because of your natural tendency to underestimate these things, you’d be surprised at how often your intentionally-deliberate overestimation actually hits really close to home.

When I was not yet even a teenager, I had this very early DOS-machine computer that could basically only save text files and run text adventure games. The first file I ever created on there was titled “Roccia’s Rules for Life,” and it was basically every little nugget of wisdom I ever picked up. If someone said something clever, or if I read a particularly pithy fortune from a fortune cookie, or if I learned some life lesson the hard way – it would all get a number and go onto this ever-growing list.

I’m pretty sad that somewhere along the way that computer – along with all of those Rules – was lost. I know at some point I had over 200, and I would love to go back now and discover what ten-year-old me thought were such vital nuggets of wisdom.

But the core concept has stuck with me, even all those years later – create personal policies as you go through life.

Life should change you. Yes, some things are just flukes, but most things that happen may happen again, and you should adjust your expectations accordingly. My father always told me to try to avoid repeating mistakes. New mistakes are inevitable, but repeated ones just means you’re taking more knocks than necessary to learn your lesson. As you go through life, the experiences you have should absolutely shape the way you behave, the expectations you hold, and the methods you use.

I mean, there are only so many times Dick Van Dyke can trip over that ottoman before it’s his fault, you know? At a certain point you either have to move it or start coming in by the back door. That’s a lesson you can write down.

My least favorite compliment (to be on the receiving end of) is “smart.”

It happens occasionally that someone pays me that exact compliment. I don’t want to begrudge anyone that says something nice to me! If you’ve ever thought of me in such terms or voiced as much, please don’t think me ungrateful. It’s just that in my whole life, that’s never been anything but a hindrance.

Being smart as a kid is such a terrible curse, especially the way the average American school is set up. It completely kills your work ethic as a kid, because if you’re smart enough that the normal work is easy, all the adults in the room just pat you on the head and move on. You’re left with the impression that life will be easy just because you were genetically gifted with a few extra IQ points above the average. But life absolutely doesn’t care about that. At all.

I don’t think I’ve ever done the following with my own children, but I hear other adults do this all the time: they tell their kid that they’re smart as an accusation. In so many parent-child interactions, being smart is the precursor to an exasperated question about behavior or performance: “You’re so smart, why did you fail this history test?” Or maybe “You’re so smart, why did you get in that fight?”

Or even, “You’re so smart, why are you unhappy?”

I’ve dedicated a huge, huge part of my adult life to self-improvement. To shedding the bad habits I learned as a child, adolescent, and young man. More than half of the posts on The Opportunity Machine are dedicated to that theme, and in addition to my own thinking and philosophizing on the topic I’ve consumed seemingly endless books, articles, speeches, lessons from mentors, and other pieces of content on how to make the various aspects of your life better. How to improve your health, how to reach your professional goals, how to raise a strong family, how to improve your interpersonal relationships. How to be happier. I’ve read a lot of great advice and thrown out a lot of bad advice, and done my best to be wise about the distinction.

Absolutely zero percent of the good advice has ever been: “Be smarter.”

The keys to all of these things aren’t intelligence. You don’t need to be smart to be healthy, successful, happy. You need to be diligent. You need to be moral. You need to be kind.

I don’t know that being smart has ever helped someone become those things. I think it often makes you think that intelligence can replace work ethic, thus killing your diligence. I think it gives you the tools to rationalize and justify bad behavior, thus killing your morality. And I think it can breed pride and contempt, thus killing your kindness.

The great answers to the questions of life aren’t undiscovered – they’re just obscured. You don’t have to be smart to find them, you just have to dig through a lot of noise that the modern world throws your way. You don’t have to be especially smart.

Shift your personal Overton Window in the direction of self-improvement. Don’t let it slip in the direction of self-harm.

Let’s say that you find the concept of killing other people and taking all of their stuff to be personally abhorrent. You would never do such a thing, never consider anything close to it, in fact. But because you’re intellectually curious about the mindset of people that advocate for such wicked behavior as a way of life, you read their manifestos. Blog posts and articles from the pro-murder-and-theft crowd. YouTube videos. You’re not looking for instructions! You’re just interested in what makes such minds tick.

So you read them… a lot. And you remain critical, and absolutely none of them convince you that murdering someone and taking all of their stuff is something you’d like to do.

But then one day, you come across an essay written by a more “moderate” member of that crowd, and it suggests that murdering and looting is extremely bad, but just beating someone up who deserved it and taking a portion of their stuff to compensate for whatever they did is acceptable, or even encouraged.

“Ah ha,” you proclaim. “Finally someone reasonable.”

But of course that’s not reasonable at all. It’s just that you’ve spent so long reading (and rejecting!) extreme claims that a less-extreme claim seems reasonable by comparison. You let your personal Overton Window shift without realizing it, even as you were firmly grounded against the extreme stance.

That’s why critical absorption of material is necessary but not sufficient. You also need context. You need broader moral philosophy, opposing claims on the other end of whatever spectrum you’re exploring, and a wider view of the influences on your influences.

Truth isn’t democratic, of course. Everyone in the world can believe that two plus two is five, and that doesn’t make it so. But you aren’t guaranteed to be the arbiter of truth, either, and the wisdom of crowds is a thing. Even if your only reason for exploring an extreme that you reject is to satisfy your intellectual curiosity (and by the way, let me say here that I think it’s very good to do that), you should be careful about who’s staring into who, you or the Abyss.

Of course, you can use this to your advantage!

When I first started trying to work out and get healthy, I read a lot of blogs, watched a lot of videos, etc. on exercise routines and mental habits to get into, etc. As is often the case, the most prominent examples were the most extreme body-transformation things advocating for wild, Gerard-Butler-in-300 level engagement. I soundly rejected all of those as being unrealistic, firmly in my position that real exercise was a scam for only people who didn’t have jobs or kids, etc.

Then one day I caught a video of a “ten-minute upper body workout” and thought “ah ha, finally something reasonable.”

The reality is that I was lazy and unmotivated. If I had found that video, I’d have made some excuse about how even that was too hard. But because I was now comparing it to all of these other much more extreme versions, it became reasonable in comparison. And so I did it, and then that ten-minute routine grew and now I’m in much better health and shape than back then.

So even if you don’t ever plan to do P90x, maybe it’s worth it to watch videos just to push some other workout just a little closer into your reach. Or maybe it’s okay to admire very wealthy people even if you don’t think you’ll attain that much wealth, because maybe it will make some other goal feel more attainable to you.

This is similar to the concept of The River, only with sources of information instead of people. If you only ever absorb information that tells you that you can only expect outcomes similar or worse to what you’re already getting, you’ll believe it. The Overton Window of your belief in yourself will shift downward. Look to the sky instead. Look for the giants whose shoulders you can stand on – or at least reach, where before you might have believed you could only reach the ankles.