Here’s a hypothetical situation: someone has offered you an amount of money to have one of your fingers surgically removed. Additional details: you get to choose the finger. The process and the recovery are both instantaneous and painless and involve no unexpected complications or side effects. You just pop into an office and pop back out with one finger missing.

Here’s your question: given the parameters above, what is the minimum amount of money you would accept in exchange for this?

I think these kinds of questions, silly and unrealistic as they are, often illuminate some deep, deep flaws in human reasoning.

First, an obvious truth: how much we’re willing to accept for something depends a lot on our current circumstances and next-best alternatives. You might be perfectly happy to accept $5,000 for an old trinket from your attic… unless you discover that it commonly goes for $20,000. Suddenly you won’t take five grand, even though the item was nothing more than clutter to you that you’d have been happy to be rid of. In this hypothetical, however, we can safely assume that this is the one and only offer you’ll ever get to remove your finger, so that doesn’t much matter. So it’s all about you.

Here is a very common answer that I immediately dismiss as unserious thinking: “I wouldn’t do it for any amount of money.”

Absurd. Completely absurd.

First off, it’s absolutely false. In a hypothetical scenario, it’s easy to act… well, hypothetically. But the reality is that if someone was actually making that offer and they had a duffel bag with millions of dollars in it, you would take that offer.

People can’t conceptualize millions of dollars actually being offered to them, so they think silly things like “I wouldn’t go through a painless and ultimately inconsequential procedure for any amount of money.”

Of course you would. Not only would you, but you should!

Let me ask a different question: imagine that someone made the same offer to you regarding your finger, but instead of money, offered to save some number of lives of children in underdeveloped nations that would otherwise die. You can save thousands of children in exchange for the finger. You’d feel pretty bad saying no now, wouldn’t you?

Well guess what, money saves lives. Pick five million dollars as your amount, donate 99% of it to effective charities, and keep a little something for yourself as a reward.

I mean heck, keep all of the money, never work again, and then use the newly-freed 40 hours per week you have to volunteer at causes of your choice. Feels like a pretty good deal for a finger, doesn’t it?

To give an example of what actually happens in the real world:

Ronnie Lott is a pro-football Hall of Famer who broke his pinky during a game. If the doctors put a pin in it and cast it to heal, he would have been out for the next eight weeks. If they cut the tip off, he could play immediately. He chose the latter. (He also later said he regretted it – but the 49ers didn’t win that year. Maybe if they had, he wouldn’t have.)

That’s a pretty rare example of this circumstance actually happening, but Lott took the deal for a lot less than five million dollars – he took it for a single game.

Choices look different when they’re actually in front of you. Anyone who denies that isn’t thinking seriously about the choice.

What does an ordinary day look like?

Maybe they aren’t ordinary. Maybe we just can’t see the extraordinary days for what they are until we see more of the context. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle – does it make sense to ask which pieces are the important ones? Even the piece sort of in the leftish-middle of just the unbroken sky is essential to the completion of the puzzle. The image depicted might contain a subject of greater interest, maybe it’s a squid and one piece has its great and terrible eye, but you still need the whole thing. You can’t just live on the extraordinary days, and you don’t know which they’ll be unless you live them all.

If you look back on your life and pick out the incredibly relevant events, how many of them happened on a date you expected to be significant? How many sea changes lined up with New Year’s Day or something like that?

They’re all ordinary days. And they’re all extraordinary.

When you flip over an hourglass, only two grains of sand are different from the rest – the first and the last. The first of your days has already passed, and by the time the last one comes it’ll be too late to do anything different.

Look well, therefore, to this day. This most ordinary of days, filled with extraordinary things. It’s a death trap; if you don’t claw your way out of it and escape into the next, you perish in this one. Try to drag some treasures out of the belly of this beast with you, only to fall into the jaws of the next one. But as each new great squid with its ravenous maw opens to swallow you whole, you can spot the extraordinary things along the way. The fellow travelers consumed by the all-consuming; the trinkets and songs left behind, the trinkets and songs you will leave behind.

None of these things can matter outside of their context, and their only context is you. Every puzzle piece needs the rest, but more importantly, they all need someone doing the puzzle, or they’re just cardboard in a box, without meaning. There is no such thing as a forest, only trees. You make a forest by walking through it, and you can do that even on the most ordinary of days.

Like today.

One of the best trips I’ve had in a long time. Beautiful weather, challenging terrain, and a focused sense of purpose. I brought very little with me. I brought even less back.

That phrase is so funny to me. A gumball machine that gives you stale gum for a quarter is a million dollar idea if you sell four million pieces of gum out of it.

The point is that no idea is worth a million dollars. Execution is. And you can execute on, if not every idea, at least many more than you think.

Some questions sound really good. They just seem neat. We can’t help it – we hear something like “if you could be any animal, what would it be” and we just sort of get lost in the possibilities. So we imagine that there’s some wisdom to be gained from what people say.

And sure, there might be. That actually might be a neat icebreaker question at a party or on a first date to just learn more about people in general. But it’s an abysmal question from the standpoint of trying to find out something specific, it’s abysmal.

There are times when you want to start with a question and go from there, and times when you want to work backward from the answer. Knowing which is which will do wonders for your ability to effectively gather information.

To start, there are really two reasons you ever want information: to learn or to make a decision.

If you want to learn, then being open-ended is the way to go. Trying to get to a specific answer when you want to learn is counter-productive. It opens you up to all sorts of bias, limits what you actually learn, and causes you to focus on rote memorization instead of true understanding. In these cases, it’s best to ask open-ended questions, things that could lead you anywhere. Whether you’re exploring a new topic or a new person, it’s great to just dive in and absorb without trying to get to some imaginary endpoint.

If you want to make a concrete decision, then you have to know what you don’t know. To take a very basic example, let’s say you’re facing the decision of whether to extend a job offer to a candidate or not. To make that decision, you have to figure out the answer first – you’re essentially looking for “will this person reliably perform these job duties at or above expectations?” Now ask yourself why you don’t already know that.

It’s likely because you don’t know enough about their past work or past reliability, so you should ask questions directly related to those subjects. It’s very not likely that it’s because you don’t know what sort of animal they would be if they could.

Today is my father’s birthday. The first one of my life where he isn’t here.

He was the coolest. He was the baddest. I miss him every damned day.

You are not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Not professionally, not personally, not ever. You shouldn’t try. In fact, you shouldn’t even necessarily try to improve the numbers in your audience.

The numbers are already there! You just have to find them.

The world is large. No matter what you do, there are thousands upon thousands of people – if not many more – who will love it. They’ll love you. You don’t need to convert people. You need to find people; you need to filter out the people who are wrong for you.

Most people don’t do this nearly aggressively enough.

When I first got my start in sales, my very brilliant manager pointed at a crowd of people. “In that group are a hundred people. Three of them want what you’re selling and would buy it if they knew about it. Let’s be ultra clear about your job: it’s to find those three people. It’s not to go through the whole group and badger each one into buying until they punch you in the face. It’s to be an efficient detective.”

So someone doesn’t like you? Isn’t picking up what you’re putting down? Cool – ask why, then move on. Don’t argue, don’t dwell. Gather the feedback, incorporate it into your search, and then move efficiently toward your people.

They’re out there, waiting for you. You’re exactly their cup of tea – find them before it gets cold.

Whenever someone makes a claim to me that someone else is a bad communicator, I first ask them if they understood what the person was trying to communicate. They usually don’t – that’s why they’re making the claim. But if you don’t understand what someone is saying, then you can’t make the claim that they’re a bad communicator!

Consider: I don’t speak French. Voltaire was, by all accounts, a wonderful communicator. But if he spoke to me in French, I wouldn’t understand a word of it. If I then said, “everything that guy said was gibberish, he’s a terrible communicator,” I would be quite the fool.

Sometimes I understand perfectly what someone else is communicating, and I cringe at the way they said it. I see myriad opportunities for misunderstanding or I look around the room and see mostly glazed eyes. Then I can claim bad communication technique on the part of the speaker.

While a communicator is responsible for communicating, that doesn’t mean they’ve failed just because you don’t get it. So don’t immediately write them off as not being worth listening to; it could be that there’s a lot of brilliance just on the other side of a little more fluency on your part.

“The energy debt charges interest,” someone said to me today. Wow.

So many of our personal struggles can be approached the way you balance a checkbook. You can’t be financially stable just by making more money, nor can you reach stability solely by curbing your expenditures. You need a balanced flow – expenditures shouldn’t outpace income, and ideally at least some of those expenditures should produce income in a virtuous cycle.

The same is true of energy, of joy, of all the other things you need to live. We use the term “live below our means” in terms of money – spending less than we’re capable of in order to save more and insulate against shocks. But how often do we do that with time? With passion?

Are you “living below your means” when it comes to how much you put in your schedule? Are you balancing the checkbook of things that give you energy versus things that cost it? Are you making sure that whatever pain you endure, you find a way to balance out?

All bills come due, sooner or later. The more you push them off, the higher the final tally will be. Someone is counting – it should be you.

The title of this post was typed entirely by my middle child, The Squish (she also typed the word “Squish”). My youngest, my son Buddy, then typed this part: hhhhiiiii

As soon as they saw me sit down to write, they raced over: “Can I help you?”

The answer to that should just always, always be yes. Not just with kids. With anyone. There are few things that can build stronger relationships than accepting the help that’s offered.

The world is absolutely full of people who want to help you. Some want to help you because they want something for it, but that doesn’t make the offer less genuine. Some want to help you even though they aren’t really able to, but they want to just be there with you during your own journey.

Sometimes it’s just a bored sales associate in a department store and helping a genuinely pleasant and appreciative customer will be the highlight of their day.

Look for ways to help others, certainly. But don’t forget to let others help you.