Here’s how time flows: Past, Future, Present, Past.

What happened to you in the past shapes your model of how you predict the future. Your model of how you predict the future is what manifests your present actions. The results of your preset actions become what happened to you in the past.

Understanding that flow gives us a good model for how to improve the outcomes.

We predict the future not based on what exactly occurred in the past, but our view of those events. If you got in a car crash, that may shape how you perceive the safety of highway travel in the future, which affects how you live your life now. But your awareness of the truth of those events matters – if you think (incorrectly) that the crash was simply a random accident, you may be more fearful. If instead you (correctly) recognize that it was because you had bad breaks from poor maintenance, you will instead increase your diligence regarding the upkeep of your vehicle.

Truth of physical acts can be ascertained or at least accurately estimated. Truth of motivations and even destiny may be harder, but that gives you freedom.

You lost your job. Was it because the modern job market isn’t to be trusted, and so you should never put in effort again? Or was it because of something more real, something narrow that you can identify, and shift in response?

If you’re going to let the past dictate your moral predictive model, then do so in a way that motivates you, not the opposite. Don’t let the past tyrannize you into abandoning the future. Let it motivate you to create a better one.

There truly are days where you just need to do for the sake of doing. To keep your muscles – mental & physical – in shape for tasks to come. To be ready for the next chapter.

You will leave things behind. Sometimes things you didn’t want to – but that can’t be helped. The same effort trying to cling or recapture will always be better spent turning the next page. You don’t have to be bitter. It was good while it lasted, and sometimes that’s what you have.

So kick off your spurs and get back on there. Go around the block once or twice to remind you the way. Make your bed, brush your teeth, and push.

Do for the sake of doing.

If someone was about to get on a bus to go to the grocery store, how would you summarize their goal?

You could say that their goal is to get to the grocery store, but that’s not right. That’s just a means to an end. The end goal is “satisfy my hunger, need for sustenance, and desire to eat something presumably tasty without sacrificing too many resources like time and money to do so.”

Their goal certainly isn’t “Get on a bus.” But more on that in a minute.

You aren’t really at the “core goal” behind an action until you reach something you can’t substitute. The person has to eat, so ultimately food at the right intersection of quality and cost is the goal. Literally everything else is a method, a tool, a path – one of several. The person in question presumably thinks it’s the correct path, but you’ll never know if you don’t see them as options, leading to a true goal, rather than as goals themselves.

It’s possible that a bus trip to the grocery store isn’t the best way for this person to get the food they want at the best value cost for them. Maybe ordering grocery delivery would be better – maybe the increased cost of delivery would counteract the time cost of the trip as well as the travel costs. Maybe not! But the point is that it’s worth looking at through the lens of knowing what you actually care about.

In general, people aren’t great at this. But they’re awful at it when it comes to their careers.

When you ask people what their career goals are, they mostly answer the equivalent of “my goal is to get on a bus.”

Let me show you the layers between true goals and what most people say & focus on. My true goal is to live a life that inspires my children to want to do awesome things with their own lives, while simultaneously creating the launchpad that allows them to do so (meaning valuable lessons, good social skills, health, and a good starting point for financial security) and letting me spend ample time just enjoying being with them as they grow up. My principles dictate the cost limits on this: even if it would improve the outcome of that goal, I won’t rob a bank, hurt anyone, etc. And you’ll notice that my goal isn’t stated in terms of a moment in time, but rather in terms of a pattern for my whole life. No single moment is a true goal.

Simply stated that way, you can see that there may be many, many ways to accomplish that goal! But there are some foundational things I’ll need to have. Obviously my own health needs to be good in order to give a good example to my kids, as well as to live long enough to see the full arc of their lives into adulthood (and to keep up with them!). I’ll need to have enough financial health to, again, be a good example – but also to save for them, provide opportunities for growth and education for them – but not sacrifice so much in terms of time and responsibility that I become detached from their lives. I also have to care about my own development in those areas, in order to learn with and guide my children. But those, while good things to do, aren’t true goals. I don’t have the true goal of financial health for myself – it simply strikes me as the most obvious way to provide financial health for my children.

Here’s a silly hypothetical counter-example: Let’s say an eccentric billionaire offers me a deal: as long as I never make more than $20k per year for the rest of my life and have a zero-dollar savings account balance every year, then this billionaire will provide each of my children $10 million upon their 18th birthday. I would take that deal in a heartbeat, because it gets me to my true goal.

Having identified my true goal and what strike me as the most efficient paths to it, I now start looking at options to execute on those paths. That means deciding between home gym equipment, a gym membership, or a personal trainer. It means deciding on savings vehicles for the kids. It means finding a job that has a good mix of schedule flexibility, opportunities for personal growth, and income. But none of those were goals. I didn’t have a goal of buying my own set of free-weights, starting a Roth IRA, or finding a specific job as an executive coach. Those were just tools to help me travel the path to my true goal.

Whew! Okay, now go back and ask someone else what their career goals are, and they’ll say “Work at Facebook.”

That is not even close to a goal. That is the equivalent of saying your goal is to get on a bus, when what you really really want is to satisfy a core need. But if you never realize that, you miss so many opportunities. If you’re so laser-focused on the bus, you might turn down a pop-up street market that is right across from the bus station and has better prices, quality and selection than the grocery store. It would have been better, but you weren’t even thinking about the true goal, just the silly tool that’s only one tiny piece.

Many of my moments of clarity and epiphany come as a result of deliberate thought, challenge, or mental exercise. I practice thinking in my writing, in my conversations with others, in the work I do. But all of the most deliberate reflection in the world can’t capture everything, and once in a while a big “ah-ha” just kind of slaps you in the face.

That happened to me this weekend. I was talking with a dear friend of mine, and he made an observation about me that I had never considered, but immediately rang true. He told me that in all the time he’d known me (and we’ve known each other for 25 years), he had never known me to be satisfied. With anything.

Wow.

Now, he didn’t mean in the sense that I was never happy, pleased, or proud. It’s not that I don’t think things are awesome or that I dislike everything in front of me. What he meant was that I never felt… done.

There’s always a new thing to do. Always more to accomplish, to improve. Always another goal, another adventure, another project. He was right.

In order to have a bit of vulnerability here in this space, I will share why.

I’m not greedy. I live very simply, in fact, from a material perspective. I’m not overly status-hungry, either. I don’t want my life to have “more” of anything in it, except maybe freedom and family. I have a simple house, but I would be fine in it forever… except I do already have a ten-year plan for improvements and changes to it. So the assessment wasn’t off.

But my point is that my lack of apparent satisfaction doesn’t come from a desire for more, or a sense of dissatisfaction with my current life.

It comes from fear. It comes from my fear that if I ever stop pushing, moving, planning, improving, striving and working – then I won’t have anything. I won’t be anything. I define myself by these things, by the effort I put into every day. When I take a (admittedly necessary) day to relax and recharge, I don’t feel human. My “days off” are still very often filled with projects, active hobbies, intentional family outings, etc.

My brain thinks of things I want to do faster than I can do them. I could force myself to take a day off from doing things, but I can’t force my brain to stop coming up with things to do.

There’s no end destination in mind. I have long since recognized that I will never be “complete” and have the big “To Do” list of my life completely checked off. I honestly fear the day that I simply can’t think of more to do, because I’m not sure how I would exist then.

In a conversation with a different friend recently, I was idly joking about what I would do if I won the lottery, and was saying that I probably would live a very similar life, except I wouldn’t work. He laughed, and said “of course you would.” He’s right. Maybe I would change a few things about how I worked, but money is a tiny factor in the motivation behind both my work ethic and what work I choose to do.

I am proud of my accomplishments, and I’m excited for the next ones. But I’m also afraid. Afraid of what it would mean to be more comfortable, to be less personally ambitious. Afraid of what lies in unused moments, so I use every one to the fullest I can. I can feel laziness and sloth lurking around every corner, ready to grab me like a tar pit, impossible to escape from. Even at my most weary, I fear rest more than I desire it.

On reflection, I can recognize this as a flaw, or at the very least a challenge – an obstacle in the way of a truly happy, healthy and fulfilled life. But I can’t intuitively map its effects onto my life. I can’t point to the exact spot where it’s doing damage, the thing that would be better if I changed. I can’t diagnose it.

Could I find a balance? Could I change this? Something so fundamental to me. So definitive. What would happen to me then? Should I strive to find these answers, work on this facet, build a different foundation for all I do?

Or is this the one time when I simply have to be satisfied with how things are?

How frequently do you accompany your serious decision-making with some light but consistent physical activity like walking?

In my experience, there are two vital components to good decision-making. You must gather correct information. And then you must have calm clarity when evaluating that information.

For that earlier stage, the most important thing to remember is that until you have enough information, that’s the only thing you should be doing. Don’t judge, evaluate, or deliberate – yet. Just gather. Find the pieces. Take notes.

When you’ve reached the point where relevant information is no longer coming in waves but a trickle, stop. Diminishing returns won’t help you, and you can deliberate until the day you die if you really want to, so now it’s time for phase two: The Walk.

You have the information, so stop trying to make the decision with all the negative physical and environmental distractions around you. Drink water, eat a light meal, put away electronics and go walk around outside. Wander a while. Take only the decision with you as a companion.

Those steps are vital, and their order is vital. You can’t make a good decision without information. But you can’t process that information from a cramped, dehydrated, tired, hungry, noisy and flashing cage.

Remember those steps, and make better decisions.

Several times in the past few days I’ve been in a situation where someone was asking or telling me something important, and there was nothing for me to say. In one case the person was angry. In another they were hurt. In another they were just thinking out loud. In all those cases, my ear was more important than my mouth.

I didn’t like it. I never do.

You can always say something: the wrong thing. I try to avoid that.

Listening instead of speaking isn’t a magical balm. People don’t automatically get better because you were a good listener. They don’t suddenly solve all their problems.

But nothing would make that happen. There was no exact combination of words that if only you figured it out, would make every problem vanish.

That’s just life, sometimes. Listen to it.

A stitch in time definitely saves nine. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But that’s easier to say in hindsight – to see what you should have stitched, should have prevented. How do you find those opportunities before you need nine stitches and a pound of cure?

You need pattern recognition. And you need to never, ever worry.

I once saw an insect crawling around in my house – an insect that wasn’t a problem, but if there were a few hundred more, it would be. I took the friend I was hanging out with and went to the store for a few traps and sprays to make a defensive perimeter. I remember my friend asking me: “Why are you so worried about one bug?”

The question struck me as very odd. I wasn’t worried at all. I wasn’t worried because I was doing something about it far ahead of when it would be desperately necessary.

That’s exactly how you avoid being worried, in fact. You worry about things outside of your control. But things that are outside of your control very often grew from things that were under your control (or could have been) earlier in time, and you just didn’t know it, see it, or act on it.

Some people seem to think that “not worrying about something” is equivalent to “don’t take any actions to prevent problems.” Reactive mode only. But to me, that seems like a perfect formula to increasing your worry – by a lot.

So try this. Any time you see something that might cause you to worry and you find yourself saying “Eh, it’s just one bug, don’t worry about it” – listen to the part that says “don’t worry.” But don’t let that tell you to ignore the event. An ounce of worry prevention is worth a pound of worry cure.

You are most vulnerable to your own tribe. Your distant enemies can’t hurt you nearly so much as those you trust and identify with. That fact alone should increase your caution and skepticism considerably.

And it is a fact. Regardless of whether you think your own tribe is “right” or not (and of course you do think that), you’re obviously more vulnerable to them. Outside influence, ideas, and even attacks are met with every defense you have ready. Not only are you already skeptical of information that comes from “them” and expectant of their attacks, you also have the advantage of having the entire rest of your tribe ready to defend you as well.

But when your tribe lies to you, you’ll cut your own arm off before you doubt. When your tribe tries to get you to do things against your own interest but in the interest of the tribal leaders, you’ll do it readily and justify it all day. And if your tribe even tries to harm you, you’ll either take the harm with pride or – if you resist – you’ll claim that it wasn’t your tribe at all, but shadowy agents of some other.

Imagine that there are two people, each trying to convince you of their position. You have zero prior information about either Position 1 or Position 2, and no awareness of the other affiliations of their spokespeople. So for the most part, you’re evaluating the arguments on the merits as you understand them. If Spokesperson 1 says “Position 2 is wrong, and here’s all the evidence to support that argument,” and Spokesperson 2 says “Position 1 is wrong, and you shouldn’t even listen to Spokesperson 1 because they’ll lie to you and tell you that it isn’t, so just stand over here with me because that makes you a good person, unlike Spokesperson 1,” then you should have a really, really strong reason to be extremely wary of #2. Even if you don’t find arguments for Position 1 convincing, at least there are arguments. Spokesperson 2 is obviously a self-interested bully.

Now, that’s how you’ll treat two people/positions that you’re neutral on. But what if that exact same scenario repeats itself, but this time Spokesperson #1 isn’t part of your tribe, and Spokesperson #2 is?

It shouldn’t make a difference. But for most people, it does. Don’t be one of those people. Recognize the patterns of bad faith arguments, and know with certainty that you will always be most vulnerable to them when they come from your own.

Speed is not about time.

It almost never takes “three days” to do something. When you order a custom piece of furniture from someone, and they tell you that it will take four weeks, that doesn’t mean it takes four weeks to make your furniture. It means that there are other things in front, and that your furniture will take X action steps, which will occur over a certain number of weeks. It does not mean that someone will be building your table 24/7 for the next month.

Keep that in mind for yourself. Things happen in action steps, not hours or days. Those action steps can happen on many different cadences. Remember that when you think something is taking too long, or if you feel too pressured, or anything like that. These things are adjustable.

“It’s taking forever to finish this jigsaw puzzle,” someone says, before putting one piece into place and then watching a show for the next hour.

“I don’t want to spend all day on this!” Then don’t – spend 30 minutes a day for two weeks.

Some things are more resilient to moving around their action steps than others, of course. And some things really do take time – it takes nine months to make a baby, pretty much no matter what else you do. But it’s far from universal – most things take exactly as long as you want them to.