Tonight during a car ride, my eldest daughter (age 9) told me that she likes making bets with herself, like to see if she can accomplish a particular goal or avoid a negative outcome. She said she makes the part of her that doubts herself bet against the “real her,” and the bet is that the self-doubt has to apologize and admit it was wrong.

There is absolutely a point you reach with your children where you realize that they are “wisdom amplification machines.” For each life lesson or bit of savvy you impart, they’re giving you back ten. I didn’t know it would come so early, but I am more glad of it than I could ever share.

Imagine that you do someone a favor, or you’re just generally helpful in some regard. They’re grateful, and they say “is there anything I can do for you?”

Most of the time, this question catches people off guard. They say “I’ll let you know,” or “oh, I’m fine but thank you!”

I get it. For one, you probably weren’t prepared for the question. And for two, you don’t want to seem like your only reason for doing the initial favor was the hope that you’d get something in return. As to that, just remember – people want to help you. It gives them a feeling of satisfaction when they get to be a hero, and it makes them feel less like they burdened you in asking you for a favor, and more like they had something worthwhile to trade. So you should accept those offers of help!

But to the first problem, preparation, how to do so?

Create an “evergreen favor.” A universal answer to the question of “is there anything I can do for you?” It should have a few criteria:

1. Something that’s always useful to you, so you don’t need to evaluate circumstance.
2. Something that is very easy for nearly anyone to do.
3. Something that a person probably would have done anyway if you just asked them.

Here are a few examples:

“How kind of you to ask! Actually yes – I have a local charity that I support that means a lot to me. Would you just give their Facebook page a like? Every boost helps!”

“As a matter of fact, you could. Would you mind just throwing one of my business cards in your purse, so if you chat with anyone in my industry you could pass it along?”

These aren’t earth-shaking favors. By themselves, they won’t move mountains. But over time a lot them can be much more impactful than a lot of nothing, which is what you get if you don’t ask. And remember, asking these things generally strengthens relationships. It makes the other person feel equal and valued, and the more people who you connect with like that, the better your life will be.

The best work happens when your mind and your body are in the same place.

There’s no such thing as “purely mental” or “purely physical” work. Writing feels very mind-only and working out feels very body-only, but that’s just not true of either.

Imagine being hunched over a keyboard, dehydrated and tired, trying to write something brilliant. You’ve got all the words in your mind, but the body isn’t there – the body is in the kitchen, in bed, anywhere else. The same with working out: you have the muscles, but if you’re angry, distracted, or upset the workout won’t be as effective, you won’t hit the same goals.

Good balance in your life comes from deciding which one needs to lead the other in any given scenario. Sometimes you need to let the body lead, and the mind has to just accept that it needs to go to the kitchen or to bed or outside or whatever else. Sometimes the body needs to follow the mind, and push through the desire to lay around on the couch in order to get work done.

Find things to do where it’s easy for mind and body to align, and where productive things happen as a result. Do more of those things, and your life will be better.

People seem to try very very hard to convince others that they’re something they’re not – even when they don’t even want to be that thing.

They wonder how they can convince a job they don’t want to hire them; how to write a cover letter that properly disguises the contempt they have for the very role they’re applying for. Or they try to figure out how to be attractive to a kind of partner that they would be exhausted by dating. Or how to get a college that they don’t want to attend to admit them.

Most of the time, people don’t even realize that they’re doing this. They’re trying hard for the sake of trying hard, to follow a proscribed general path that in no way applies to them directly.

You don’t need to get into Harvard, land some high-paying job, and date that high-maintenance beauty queen. Do it if you want to. But – and this is a radical idea, I know – don’t do it if you don’t want to.

If you’re trying to “fake” your way into a goal, and the process is so incredibly frustrating that you can’t imagine how you’ll succeed at it – maybe you shouldn’t. Pursuing a goal shouldn’t be something you hate. Don’t just do it out of fear of the alternative – a life of no accomplishments or success. Just look for something else to do instead.

Every day, there’s going to be a moment when you’re at your absolute best – your most creative, energetic, motivated, savvy. The moment when you’re most “in the zone.” Likewise, there will be a moment when you’re the opposite of all that.

This is true even if the day overall is very bad or very good; there was still a zenith and a nadir. It’s true even if the gap between them isn’t that large on a given day, though the gap is often wider than you think.

The point is this – who is capturing the benefit of the highest point, and who is getting the worst work from the lowest?

Sadly, many people give the very best of themselves each day to something they don’t particularly care about, and save the very worst of themselves for… themselves. During the time of day when you’re at the height of your powers, you’re working for someone else, doing something that isn’t serving you beyond a paycheck. And when you want to work on your own goals, you’re doing so with whatever’s left over.

Reverse that. Make sure that you and your loved ones, your goals and your aspirations – make sure those are getting the very best of you every day. If you’re working a job you don’t really care about in order to pay the bills while you write the novel of your dreams, then why are you working the job during your brightest and most creative hours, and saving the novel-writing for when you’re tired and drained at the end of the day? Get a second-shift job so you can write when your heart is full, and go punch a clock with what’s left.

There is always a best and a worst, and someone gets both. Make sure it goes where you want it to.

The better an excuse is, the more damaging it is as a trap.

Some excuses are so laughably bad that we actually feel embarrassed about even considering them. In a way, they become a little more motivating, because we think not only about the consequences of failing to achieve our task, but also the social shame of trying to pull out something on the level of “my dog ate my homework” as an explanation.

But some excuses are so widely accepted that we can even find ourselves subconsciously steering towards them in order to have a viable reason to give up, to fail, with the explicit approval of our peers.

That’s a killer trap, right there.

Here’s how you can catch it. Watch yourself, and watch your own mind – look out for the wave of relief an excuse tends to bring washing over you before you’ve actually failed. Imagine a college student, a week before a final paper is due. He feels stressed about the deadline, but then he also starts to feel (unrelatedly) a bit under the weather. Suddenly, relief! “Oh good,” he thinks, “I’ll be so sick I won’t be able to do this project, and everyone will understand and it’ll be okay.” The deadline is still a week away, and all he has is a sniffle!

Let that shock you back to work! Drink orange juice, go out in the sun, and get writing. When you feel the relief of a good excuse coming, fight it for your life. That’s a siren’s call, and it’s too easy to let it crash you to the rocks.

There is a lot of value to just dumping a bunch of stuff on a table and seeing what emerges after you play for a while.

When kids do these kinds of crafts, it’s good messy fun – I’ll put a bunch of paper, markers, glue, paint, randomly-shaped bits of scrap wood, plastic thingies, and whatever else on the table and just let them go nuts. At some point, there’s a rainbow-colored frog or a sort-of firetruck or something. That wasn’t what they set out to make, of course. They just played, and at some point their play started to look like a frog so they went with it.

As adults, you can do that in the artistic sense, but it’s also a great strategy when you have a lot of information and/or resources but you don’t know what you want to make yet. Just start playing in there. Write stuff, move things around, and soon it might start to look like something. When it does, polish it and see.

The “dump everything on the table and go” strategy has a lot of merit – and it’s better than endlessly deliberating when you already have a lot of stuff to use. Just get crafty.

As always, take the day to be more free. It’s the one thing that never loses its marginal benefit to your soul.

If you pick your foot up, you’ll have to put it back down. Lean forward just a little bit, and that becomes a step.

Sometimes you have to put a task in your own way, just so you have to get it done in order to move. Sometimes that’s what you do to keep the quicksand from getting you.

Don’t even try to take the step. Just pick your foot up, and the step has no choice but to happen. Then cheer – grab the momentum it gives. Pick your other foot up.

I believe in you.