Sometimes – not often, not nearly as often as you think – something bad is going to happen to you that was well and truly not your fault. Some foul misfortune will befall you and it will be something you totally couldn’t have seen coming or reasonably prepared for; a true “black swan” event. Whatever negative consequences the event brings, it also brings an insidious trap, and it is your duty to avoid it.

Here is your mission, first and foremost: don’t make things worse.

When such an event befalls you, you’re going to have to work hard to fix things. To extract yourself from this unfortunate circumstance will require a great deal of effort, but the trap works against you. Let me explain the trap, so you can see it.

First, the black swan event. It’s bad, and you’re truly blameless. You become a figure deserving of sympathy. This is dangerous. Because the next thing that happens is that you do a whole bunch of stuff to make things worse, and then you get mad if anyone points it out. Now you’re worse off, you’re confused about the total causes of your current circumstance, and you’re less sympathetic – you find your allies evaporating and you don’t know why. Suddenly, your situation is too horrible to recover from.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

Jane suffers a tragic event – despite taking all reasonable precautions, she loses her house in a fire. The insurance company pulls a few shady moves and fights her on the payout, resulting in Jane being in dire circumstances. By itself, this is a situation in which Jane deserves a lot of sympathy. But then Jane decides to invest the meager payout she’s already received from insurance on lottery tickets. When none of them hit, she trashes the hotel room she’s been put up in and gets kicked out. Since she has no shelter, her kids get taken away. She takes to social media to garner help and sympathy for her situation, claiming that she’s homeless and has had her children taken away because the insurance company did her dirty. When someone points out that she also blew what money she did have on lottery tickets and got herself kicked out of the hotel, she exclaims “My house burned down! How dare you?!”

You see the problem here?

The original problem was both severe and genuinely not Jane’s fault. But she failed to apply the proper triage. Instead of recognizing that her situation needed a lot of work and dilgence, she made things much worse. Some part of her took the fact that she had a temporary hall pass for bad behavior as a blank check to go completely bonkers. In her mind, everything wrong truly is still the fault of that original event and she remains blameless. As a result, she suffers increasing cognitive distance from anyone who could and would help her.

This exact trap is why so many bad events lead to spirals. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it won’t be that way for you if you remember what you need to do. Triage of bad events requires that you maintain a level of discipline above that of normal. This is more difficult, and no one’s claiming it isn’t! But if you lose your job due to a layoff, don’t go on a week-long bender and make things worse. If you go to jail for a crime you didn’t commit, don’t punch the judge when you get released. You absolutely can make things better, but before you do: don’t make things worse.

I am surrounded by love. I have three incredible children, and even as I write this, they are busy at the table with crayons and paper, making me notes and pictures and cards. They heap love upon me, shower me with their adoration and fill my life with joy.

And yet, there is a hole. A distance.

I’m grateful for all that I have, but this is my first Father’s Day without the man who taught me how to make it.

Dad taught me how precious love is. Despite its abundance, it can be oh so scarce as well. My father knew about the scarcity of love, despite its abundance. He told me that his own father passed away without the words “I love you” ever crossing the air between them, not once. My father struggled with expressing his own love for me when I was younger; only in his later years did he break that barrier. In so doing, he taught me how much love can be a journey. Not something to take for granted, but something to cherish.

I tell my own children I love them about a thousand times an hour, and they say the same back. Those are the flowers of the seeds my father planted.

He isn’t here. I haven’t felt a day since his passing that I didn’t need him for something, didn’t miss the way problems evaporated in his presence. He heaped love upon his grandchildren as if a dam had broken; as if there had always been this boundless capacity for expression of emotion within him, and this was all he needed. The practice made him better at expressing his love for me, too – our relationship was at its absolute strongest during the last ten years when he was a grandfather and we were both fathers.

We took so much of that journey together, and now I have to go the rest of the way without him. It feels like very far to go, and it often feels lonely. But they are good, wonderful children. And he taught me good, wonderful things.

That makes me miss him more, but it also makes me know I was always in good hands. So are they.

Time for us to go be the best on the beaches.

This week I’m taking a family vacation. Reflection, relaxation, perhaps even a little rest. Preparing for these things always rattles me a bit, but it’s more than worth it.

Enjoy your own adventures, my friends!

No matter how smart you are, big parts of your brain are very, very dumb.

I’ve generally found that people don’t like to admit this. People think of anything that happens in the brain as “part of intelligence,” and people absolutely equate intelligence with moral worth. So if your leg kicks automatically when the doctor hits it with a tiny hammer, we think “huh, neat.” But when an equally-reflexive stimulus-response happens within our emotional or mental state, we get super mad, defensive, and offended. “There’s no way my sadness could be caused by something as simple as bad food and darkness because I’m an evolved and intelligent and logical person! My sadness must be because I have very legitimate and complicated reasons to be sad!” Eat some broccoli and go outside, ya Morlock.

The point is, it’s as silly to try to overcome this with logic and willpower as it is to try to use logic and willpower to stop bleeding when you get cut. Just do what your stupid brain wants and it’ll give you everything you could ever desire.

In sales offices, there’s an old tradition of “ringing the bell” when you make a big sale. Lots of offices still do it – you ring a literal bell or hit a gong or something when you close on a house sale or get a big contract signed. Here’s the thing though: that salesperson is already going to get many other rewards – heck, they’re going to get paid. They’re going to get accolades at the next sales meeting. They’re going to get promoted. So why do they need to hear a loud, fun noise?

Because your dumb monkey brain can’t associate a thing you just did that it doesn’t fully understand with a paycheck you’ll get in two weeks or a promotion you’ll get in two years. Your dumb monkey brain needs a big happy noise to make it realize it did a big happy thing.

You might not like that, but if you just go ring the stupid bell, you will feel happier. You will be less anxious the rest of the day. You will feel proud. You will even feel motivated tomorrow – and every other time you hear someone else ring that bell. Oooh, someone in your tribe made the big happy noise! Hooray!

Just because parts of your brain are dumb doesn’t mean you’re dumb. Your brain responding in this way to the bell isn’t some sign that you’re no more intelligent than Pavlov’s dogs. It just means that your very smart, very logical, very awesome higher consciousness is housed inside an evolved machine, and that evolved machine is made of reflexes. Thank goodness! Most of those reflexes automate systems of response that keep you alive; you’d be dead in minutes if you had to consciously decide everything your body does.

So don’t be mad if the price for that is ringing a stupid bell every now and then. Just do it; go outside, eat vegetables, take a nap, get some exercise, and give yourself a cookie when you finish a big project. For this small of a price, the whole world is laid at your feet.

When my oldest daughter was under two years old, she accidentally took a flying nose-dive into a coffee table at a relative’s house (as kids do, you know). She was wailing and distraught; I scooped her up to comfort her and check for injuries. The pain was real but no permanent damage was done, so I gave her a cookie to soothe her.

She ate it, sniffling but appreciative. By the time she had devoured it, all was well. She went back to playing – and immediately climbed onto the couch, threw out her arms, and leaped face-first into the coffee table. Screaming and with tears streaming down her face, she pointed at the cookie jar.

Oops.

Sometimes in our attempts to be kind, we incentivize the wrong thing. We accidentally create a reason to fail. You don’t want to be handing out crash cookies for the rest of your life. Sympathy and comfort are fine – good, even. But mix it with discussions about improvement and encouragement to try again differently. Don’t reward the broken nose.

If you can identify a problem, solving it is very easy. Identifying a problem is not as simple as it sounds. In fact, it’s often hard because it sounds simple.

Let’s say the pipes under your kitchen sink spring a leak and now there’s water spraying all over your kitchen. Oh no! What’s the problem?

Duh, the problem is that the pipes are leaking, right? Having figured that out, you quickly set to trying to fix the problem: you wrap a bunch of towels around the pipes, trying to stem the tide. It doesn’t work. You use duct tape; it maybe works a little better, but clearly not enough. You go to the store to get new pipes, and when you return there’s three inches of water in your kitchen. You start to replace the pipes, and it’s a disaster.

You misidentified the problem.

The problem wasn’t “my pipes are leaking!” The problem was: “there’s water everywhere!” With that problem in mind, you seek a solution: “I want there to not be water everywhere.” Easy, you turn off the water main in your basement, problem solved. Sure, now there’s another problem to solve (“I can’t use the water utility in my house”), but that’s less urgent. Correct identification of the real problem at hand in the immediate sense created better outcomes.

I see this in hiring all the time. People think the problem is “I need a good marketing manager.” So then they try to solve that problem by trying to figure out what makes someone a good marketing manager and then trying to hire that person. But that’s wrong. The problem is: “my customers don’t know about my product.” That’s a different problem, and if you focus on that, you’ll find solutions. Even if the solution is “hire a marketing manager,” you’ll be better able to understand how to do that and what to look for if you focus on “solving for X” instead of “what makes a good abstract marketing manager?”

Think of it like wishes. If you could wish for an outcome, you wouldn’t wish to hire a marketing manager. You’d wish for your customers to know about all your products and how good they are. So start with that and work backward, minimizing the number of steps it takes to get there. That’s how you find good solutions.

I am fascinated by how subtle language shifts can influence our deeper reasoning. Little quirks of language sometimes reveal a more relevant meaning if you catch them at the right angle.

For instance, the way we talk about how much time something “takes.” It really does take it, doesn’t it? A task takes time – from you. You’re the one with the time, and only so much. And then something takes it from you.

We don’t refer to the fun stuff as “taking time” very often. Playing with my kids doesn’t “take time,” because that’s a phrase we reserve for marking things that have to be done but aren’t what we’d really choose to do if we didn’t require the outcome.

Interesting that “give it some time” usually just means “wait.” So you don’t have to give it time at all – you can go do something else!

But really, my work doesn’t “take time” either. I’m in charge around here, and if I didn’t want to give my time to that work, I wouldn’t. I make an active choice; I’m not robbed. At least, not by that.

Time is precious and I don’t like it stolen from me. I love driving but hate commuting, for example. Driving, when I choose to do it, is fun – music, scenery, perhaps good company, all that great stuff. But commuting often means traffic and other deadweight losses; now that’s something that “takes” time from me! So I choose to put myself in that path as little as possible. I avoid putting my time where it’s vulnerable to being taken.

Of course, the adage of “a man with nothing can’t be robbed” is true of time, too. If you want to truly avoid the possibility of your time being taken, then give it willingly – where you want it. Don’t be idle. Be fun.

If you ever find yourself working really hard to convince yourself of something… don’t.

It’s barely ever worth it to try to convince other people of stuff. When it comes to yourself, don’t use motivated reasoning. That’s when you (emotionally) want a certain outcome, so you try to figure out which chain of logical-sounding arguments will get you there, rather than taking the facts and your core values and going where they lead you.

So you’re trying to convince yourself that it’s okay to eat that extra helping of cake. You want the cake, so you come up with all sorts of nonsense like “Well, I did take the stairs at work today…” Stop. Stop convincing. Here are the facts: the extra helping of cake represents a net health loss. Here is a core value: you desire health. The math works out pretty easily for one side, here.

You know the right answer, or you wouldn’t be having the mental wrestling match with yourself to begin with.

I read an article recently that claimed most Americans don’t intuitively understand percentages. They can’t grok them – in fact, according to one part of the article, just about a third of people chose a smaller of two monetary bonuses because of the two choices, one was listed as a dollar amount and one was listed as a percentage of some different number and people couldn’t figure out which one was the bigger total gain.

Now, lots of people might read information like that and groan with disappointment at their society or whatever. Not me! I’m usually thrilled about stuff like that.

Why? Well for one, anything most people don’t know is essentially a free superpower for the taking. If most people can’t do something that you can, you’re like Superman. So I quickly checked in with my kids to make sure they knew how to do percentages (both in terms of the mathematics and running a few intuition questions past them). They knew their stuff and seemed pretty sure I was insane for even asking.

But now I feel like Jor-El sending his child to Earth in a rocket. I don’t worry about what “most Americans” can do – I can’t affect it. But I know what three specific ones can (and will) do, and I am content.

“If you don’t have anything nice to say…”

…then you’re a grouchy, uncreative person. There is always something nice to say. It doesn’t have to be about the thing right in front of you. You don’t have to put a silver lining on every cloud – sometimes you just stub your toe on a rock and that doesn’t need a positive spin. But that toe-stubbing didn’t erase every good thing in existence!

So you don’t need to say something nice about everything. But if you ever think there’s nothing nice to say at all, that’s on you, not the world. The world is just the net total of all the good and bad we humans put into it. Put some more good in it.

The sun is always shining somewhere!