I would like to share one of my favorite pictures with you:

That is a picture of my eldest daughter, my Beansprout, when she was just a Bean. Five years old. She took ballet that year, and this picture is from her recital. Isn’t she beautiful? Perfect, graceful, in the moment?

My favorite part of the whole picture is all the way on the right, that tiny hand you can just barely see.

Why is that my favorite part? Because, if you note the position that hand (belonging to the next girl in line) is in, you’ll see that it’s clearly not in the same position as the Bean’s. That’s because what you can’t see in this moment is that the Bean – the perfect, graceful, beautiful Bean – is doing not one thing she’s supposed to be doing.

There was a whole coordinated, choreographed dance planned for this recital. The Bean abandoned it almost immediately and just did whatever she wanted. She wasn’t nervous; she didn’t forget what the “correct” moves were. She just did whatever she wanted – she danced, the way her heart told her to.

And she was beautiful, graceful, perfect.

Let us all be like her, in all our moments. Find our own grace where we will, not where the lines of others tell us we must.

You can prepare for anything and still not be prepared for everything. Sometimes life doesn’t just throw you a curve ball – it throws a few at once.

All problems are still solvable, but sometimes the solution really is “chuck it and start over tomorrow.” One of the most potent skills you can learn is being able to chuck your stress about it right into the ocean alongside whatever was causing it.

Look, someday something is going to kill you. Is this it? No? Then you’ve already got it licked, you’ve just got to see how. Two disasters or ten – you’re not dying today. You got this.

Sometimes “right” and “wrong” aren’t binary. If you have a button and pushing it shocks you, then sure – there’s a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do.

Most of the time though, you don’t have a binary choice between two options, one obviously right and one obviously wrong. You have a choice between twenty different things, one of which is “most right” and the rest of which are “neutral.”

Here’s an example: You’re looking for some item that you stored in a shoebox in your garage years ago. When you turn on the light, you see that the shelves are lined with about twenty shoeboxes. One of them has the object you’re looking for, so that’s the “right” box. But there’s no “wrong” box!

Why aren’t the other boxes “wrong?” Because they don’t have poisonous snakes in them, for one. They just have other junk you don’t care about. And it’s not like you only get to look in one box – you look in boxes until you find the thing you’re looking for.

Now imagine it’s hours later, and your friend comes over and finds you sitting on the garage floor, staring intently at the wall covered in shoeboxes. He asks what you’re doing, and you say “I put an old photo album in one of these boxes years ago, and I’m trying to remember which one. I’m wracking my brain trying to remember when exactly I put the album away, and what shoes I wore at the time, and stuff like that.”

Your friend would think you were insane. He would – rightly – ask you why you don’t just start opening the boxes until you find what you want.

“That could take a long time! I might open the wrong box!”

Sure, but… how long have you been sitting here, exactly?

Look, in a lot of cases, there is no wrong thing. There’s just some variable amount of time between you and the (inevitable) right thing. Identifying those situations when you’re in them is crucial because, in those situations, it is paramount that you stop thinking and just start doing. Just start opening boxes. You’ll open a few that don’t have what you want. So what? You’ll find what you want much faster than sitting on the floor staring at the wall.

A fable:

A man wanted a particular clay sculpture for his garden. He had in mind a very specific sculpture, but he couldn’t find it. Ultimately, two different people offered him two different things. One offered him a clay sculpture, but it was worse in every way than what he wanted; it was smaller, of poor craftsmanship, and depicted an entirely different subject than the one desired by the man.

The other person offered the man a mound of clay. It was of very good quality and there was plenty of it, though it was – of course – just a mound of clay.

The man thought aloud, “if my goal were simply to always choose the better of two options, as evaluated in the current moment, I could choose this sculpture. A finished sculpture is finer than a mound of clay if one evaluates the world only as a single moment in time. Even if a few additional moments are considered, the sculpture retains one allure: it is finished. It requires no further work from me, save for setting it into place.

“But if one considers the long view of happiness, one would realize that though clay is not a sculpture, it can become so. Though I do not possess the sculptor’s tools, I can obtain them. Though I do not know how to use them, I can learn. Ambition is a powerful thing, and no one else’s ambition could ever shape clay as closely to my own desires as I could, given the effort. And so, as a wise man, I must choose the clay.”

Raw materials and the opportunity to apply effort to them are a better reward than a finished product you don’t want. Pick the job with lots of opportunities to grow and shape what you do over the rigid one with a higher starting salary. Pick the untamed plot of land over the house you don’t really like.

Pick the clay.

The more things grow, the less you can observe them. This can often feel like chaos, like things are getting out of control – but it’s just the natural evolution of things. It’s what you want.

When your children are tiny, you have pretty much 100% control over every second of their lives. They’re with you constantly, they’re not exposed to anything you don’t filter, and so on. You also have to work pretty constantly (sometimes against them, it can seem) to keep them alive.

You don’t want this to last forever! That would be a nightmare.

But the more independence they gain, the more independence they have.

If you start a business with just yourself, it’s the same thing. The more it grows, the less you can see and touch directly. The more you have to trust your prior self to have embedded the right behaviors into the growth. And when it feels most painful, most stressful, just remember – the stress comes from you trying to hold on tighter.

When it takes the most strength to hold onto the kite, that’s when you do the most damage by doing so. Let it go; it’s ready to fly.

It always weirds me out when people say they want to do work they’re “passionate” about. I’m going to try to articulate a bit why I think that’s not only weird, it’s probably hurtful.

To begin with, “passion” is an emotional state. Emotional states are fleeting, and they’re a bad basis for making major decisions. Feel free to pick what you want to eat on your birthday based on mood, but please choose your regular diet and nutrition regimen based on information, logic, and reason.

All the best relationship advice out there says that while yes, it’s super awesome to feel “sparks” or “butterflies” when you meet someone, you definitely shouldn’t make long-term life-altering decisions based on that. Ask that person out because you feel butterflies when they walk by, yes! But buy a house and have three kids with them for… you know, much better reasons.

People say they want work they feel passionate about, but that’s simply asking too much of the world. First, you have to decide: what does that even mean?

What makes you feel passionate? About anything? You’re imagining a world you’re not prepared to define. Most people feel “passionate” about money, status, and not paying too much in personal costs for either. And I’m going to tell you something deeply uncomfortable: if you want to feel passion but you don’t know the answer to “for what,” then that probably describes you, too.

“Meaning” is not synonymous with “passion,” but meaning is what you should be pursuing. If I only work out when I feel “passionate” about it, then I’m definitely not going to get as much out of it as I will if I respect the meaning.

If you bring your own passion to something meaningful, that formula will tend to create a self-sustaining cycle. If you want other things from that, you can create them – things like money or status. That’s not nearly as hard as you think it is, but it almost always requires you to be really focusing on something meaningful and pursuing it. Passionately. The arrow points the other way; work doesn’t give you passion. Passion gives you work.

There’s an old adage: “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” The idea behind the adage is that an industrious person works hard to build wealth in order to leave it to their children. Their children grew up around hard work and saw the benefits so they’re responsible with the money they’ve inherited, but they don’t have to work nearly as hard themselves. As a result, their children grow up wealthy but don’t learn commensurate responsibility; they squander their money and are poor again.

It’s not always true, of course. But it’s true often enough to have created the adage. Leaving things better for your kids (and even if you don’t have them yourself, leaving the world better for all the kids) is humanity’s most noble pursuit. I think most of the most salient problems on Earth are generation-length problems, and we could solve them in a generation if we accepted that. But people are often selfish, and so they want to choose “solutions” that are anything but, sold by snake-oil salesmen who promise that you can have everything better today if you just sign here.

But you should not only be shepherding resources towards your children, you should also be teaching them to be shepherds. I would never hand over the car keys to my child without first making sure that child was a responsible driver. But I will work hard to make sure my children have cars, because early access to reliable transportation opens up many opportunities for them.

Give resources. Teach their use. Teach the teaching of their use. And share the values and vision of a better world. Lay yourself on that altar if you get the opportunity. You will not live forever anyway, but any sacrifice you can make for your kin will echo for eternity.

The first time you accomplish something amazing, it feels amazing. The second time, even if you complete the exact same amazing accomplishment, it feels… okay?

It doesn’t matter how objectively incredible the actual accomplishment is. Because there is no objective measure of “amazing.” Picking up your foot and putting it back down in front of you without falling on your face is a pretty simple task that you do thousands of times a day without even thinking about it, but the very first time you did it the people who love you went absolutely bananas.

Accomplishing anything new pretty much serves two purposes. One is “proof of concept.” You climb Mount Everest to prove that you can. The other purpose is to start a habit. You take your first step because you want to take millions more.

So when you take your second step, and the cheering seems to drop off, even in yourself – do not despair. If the accomplishment is no longer shocking, then that means you’re doing exactly what you want to do. What once was incredible is now routine, because you’re incorporating the incredible into your everyday. That’s the way to an amazing life.

The world is full of middlemen.

In a very oversimplified view of the world, for every product or service there exists the person who provides it and the person who consumes it. And then there are a bunch of people in the middle, sometimes.

Wildly reductive, but true enough in many cases. I don’t buy my eggs (most of the time) directly from a farmer. I buy them from a grocery store – so the grocery store is a “middleman.”

While not always the case, often the term “middleman” is used in a pejorative way; whether it’s commercials for companies who “cut out the middleman, and pass the savings on to YOU” or folks who simply curse their existence and blame them for every inconvenience. And the fact is, many middlemen are parasitic rent-seekers. But others are so incredibly helpful that you’d be crazy to “cut them out!”

Take the grocery store example. What a glorious middleman! Imagine going to the store and picking up twenty items. Relatively simple errand. Now imagine that instead, you had to go to the factory or farm where each of those twenty items was produced in order to buy it. Ugh!

The good kind of middleman collects, organizes, and bundles for you. They reduce the space in the middle! They aren’t adding one step to a process; they’re removing 19.

So what’s the bad kind?

Picture ticket scalpers. Here’s a concert venue with five thousand tickets to sell for an upcoming show. They can sell to you directly, and in fact, would like to do so. But before they get the chance, an unscrupulous person buys all five thousand tickets the second they go on sale. Then they turn around and re-sell them at a much higher price than the one originally set by the venue.

This is the bad kind of middleman – someone who creates more middle solely for the purpose of extracting some value for themselves. They aren’t providing any actual benefit to either side (unlike grocery stores, which provide tremendous benefit to both the consumers of the products and their producers). They’re just parasites.

Grocery stores and ticket scalpers are obvious. They’re easy to spot for what they are. Not so with all middlemen. Especially as you get deeper and deeper into niche industries, there can be some weird examples of different steps in the long process between original producer and end consumer. It won’t always be so obvious which ones are adding value and which ones aren’t, because they’ll almost all have a story for why they’re the former and not the latter.

So here’s a quick mental check: say “if this person didn’t exist, would it be easier to get what I want or harder?” Follow this question for grocery stores (way harder) or ticket scalpers (way easier – mostly; there’s a case to be made that some level of scalping just helps shift goods from time-preference to money-preference but that’s a different subject altogether). Now you can run that basic check on any proposed service someone tries to sell you. Usually you’ll be happy you did.

See, I helped you get closer to your end goal – and I didn’t even charge you. Praise the middle!