I’ve always been a sucker for a grand gesture. Playing it safe has its place, but the more important something is to you, the less safe you should play it.

I think bold moves work for a lot of reasons. For one, they have a “burn the boats” quality: you’re committing to something in a way that leaves you fewer options to back out. And that’s another reason they work, because that commitment tends to be public. As long as you don’t cry wolf very often, people can see that your move is above and beyond what you normally do, and thus you effectively transmit your seriousness about what you’re trying to do. Talk is cheap, but actions speak volumes.

And maybe that’s another reason I love them. Talk is cheap, which means even when it works, it isn’t a terribly good story later. So much of what we leave behind is just the stories, so you might as well aim for at least a few great ones. Even if your bold move doesn’t work, the story of trying and failing is better than the story of how you played it safe.

Screw your courage to the sticking place, my friends.

When you’re reading someone else’s story, they organize it for you. The chapters end when they end, and the story concludes when it feels right to the author.

When it’s your story, the words and pages just go until they don’t. No one can organize it but you. So if the story you’re in feels a little disorganized right now, don’t worry. That just means it’s yours.

There are lots of things you understand. If you can model something you don’t as something you do, you can transfer that understanding. So a really useful “meta” skill is just being able to cross-model things.

Here’s an example. Many of my clients have inadvertently adopted the model that “more stress” equals “more productivity” in a linear fashion. They feel stressed so they’re unproductive, but they’re unproductive so they’re stressed, so they add more stress by trying to do more in order to be more productive, and ka-boom.

Here’s a model a lot of people understand, though. Imagine you’re flying a fighter jet. You push the engine really hard, and the whole thing starts to shake and rattle. It starts to wobble and the instruments start to go red. You’re not flying very efficiently. Is your response, your solution, to give her more gas?!

No! You ease up. You quickly recognize that there’s an optimal flight speed, and it isn’t necessarily max power. You understand this even if you’ve never flown a fighter jet in your life.

This is why it’s awesome to just open up and let yourself learn weird things that aren’t directly relevant to your primary goals. Go watch that video about African snail mating habits! Who knows, maybe it’ll contain a model that helps you figure out a tricky client retention problem you’ve been having.

There are plenty of benefits to being a model learner.

You put a little bait on your hook, looking for something specific. You cast your line out into the darkness and you let it trail. You sail on through life, with many such threads, and some of them never snag. They just trail off, growing longer and longer year after year. You could cut them, but you have other lines to see to, and you forget. They grow invisible, all these gossamer strands that lead off from your soul into the darkness.

Until one day, that little tug. It might be nothing. But it might be everything, so what do you do? Is this the reminder to cut it? To finally take the sharp blade of decision and cut away an old dream? But that line snags on both ends. If you’d cut it when it was loose, it would have been easy. But you didn’t. Now it’s wrapped around something in your heart, and the weight on the far end might be too heavy to haul in.

Cut it and you cut deep, both ways. Haul and you might drag, pulling yourself backward as much as you’re pulling something else forward. Haul and you might drown. Even if you bring it up, is it what you still want? Did you truly want it then? Has your shape not changed in all those years? Has not its shape changed as well?

It’s a trap, all the more insidious because you set it yourself. Your worst nemesis laid that trap for you: your younger mind, caring not for your eventual fate but reaching up through water and time to drag you back, as if it could reclaim what it lost because it thinks you stole it.

And you’ll do it, too. You’re strangling some older version of you right now, caught in a web of gossamer strands you throw into the ocean, looking for anything to slow your journey down the river. You want to be caught, or you couldn’t be. The strands have to snag at both ends, after all.

Being able to talk about concepts without endorsing them is a powerful – and necessary – tool for advancing our common understanding. Analogies and shared frames of reference help us communicate, and the ability to create them is the ability to think together with other people.

There are two kinds of people (or perhaps, just two kinds of traits that some people have) that make this sort of shared communication extremely difficult. Some people use hypotheticals in bad faith, and some people accuse other people of doing that first thing.

Sometimes a hypothetical situation is obviously bad, but smart people still want to work through the implications of it because understanding is good, and that understanding can help in a variety of other situations. For example, I could posit the hypothetical of Ukraine losing the war to Russia and want to consider what that would mean. That doesn’t mean I want that to happen, and smart people have the ability to understand that.

But some people will sometimes use these questions in bad faith. For example, a racist might say “Let’s just imagine a hypothetical society with only one race.” They’re not really trying to refine their thinking; they’re trying to sneak an idea through the Overton window.

Because those people exist, people who aren’t very intellectually secure will often accuse anyone who even wants to discuss an idea of being in full support of that idea. So I might want to suggest examining what happens if we have a higher or lower minimum wage, and people will instantly decry that line of thinking as being in favor of a particular position.

The simplest solution is this: always think in good faith, and eliminate people from your intellectual circle who accuse you of doing otherwise anyway. The people who see hidden plots in critical thought are the same people incapable of it, so in a way that serves as a good litmus test of who is worth conversing with. Remember, when it comes to signal and noise, screeching is always the latter.

For any of my readers younger than the age of about 50, there used to be a thing called a “Rolodex.” It was just a little desktop object that conveniently held the phone numbers of your contacts, but the word is still a nice shorthand for “the list of people you have contact info for.”

I once worked with someone with very few actual skills, who was nonetheless one of the most valuable people at our organization because he had a billion-dollar Rolodex. He was in fundraising and having a contact list whose combined net worth was over a billion dollars was a pretty fantastic value-add in that kind of role.

That’s an extreme example, but the point is that contacts are good – and most people don’t cultivate them. See, a “contact” is more than just a person you met once and have a business card for. This is the internet age; I can look up anybody’s phone number, but that doesn’t mean they’ll answer for me. A contact is someone who will specifically take my call if I make it.

So step 1 is meeting them, sure. But steps 2 through 20 are the important ones. Those are the steps where you follow up, provide occasional value, remember little details, and other things like that. It’s more than just adding them on social media; it’s actually giving them a reason to remember you.

Add people to LinkedIn, absolutely. But don’t forget that adding people to a professional networking site does nothing if you don’t actually network. If you’re not chatting, that Rolodex isn’t worth squat, no matter who’s in it.

I don’t think most people appreciate how big a deal it is to make even a small improvement in the odds of success for an activity you do frequently.

If you make driving 5% safer for yourself, you’re doing yourself a huge favor over the course of your life. If you reduce your chance of a heart attack by 5%, that’s years added to your life. But people treat these things like they’re small because their likelihood of affecting a single incident is too small to notice.

Good advice doesn’t always work, but that doesn’t make it not good. Buckling your seat belt is solid wisdom even if you know someone who got killed despite wearing one. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that something isn’t worth doing unless it guarantees success. These little improvements add up. A lucky life starts with a little tilt.

The process of solving problems and the process of creating solutions aren’t exactly the same. They’re adjacent and related, but there’s a time and a place for both. If you mix them up, you’re often making things worse for yourself.

Consider a burning building. While the building is on fire, that’s the wrong time to think about designing and installing a sprinkler system. It’s the wrong time to research pricing for flame-retardant carpeting. If a building is on fire right now, you should put the fire out – even if you have to do so in a less-than-perfectly-efficient way.

This is true even (and especially!) of smaller problems. If you respond to every problem by going to the drawing board for a system-wide solution, you’ll be spending far too much juice on every issue. You’ll also be making a lot of snap decisions when you often should do nothing at all, besides just address the current scenario as-is.

Instead, you should have a set schedule for visiting larger, systemic issues within any system. If you run a business, problems are going to come up all the time. Each one will seem like a major emergency. Most won’t be, and very few will actually require designing an entirely new system to handle.

When a problem occurs, solve it and track it. If a light burns out, replace the bulb, and note that you did so; don’t install a whole new lighting system. Every quarter, review your notes on the problems. If a bunch of bulbs burned out, then sure – take a look at a deeper issue. If it was the one time, you’re fine buying a new bulb now and then.

Taking this approach also lets you deploy those solutions in a reasonable way. If you’re running around in a panic all the time, those solutions aren’t going to be implemented well. They won’t be communicated well, either. If you only create new systems at regular intervals, you build for stability in the long term.

Visualize. Imagine you could turn down someone’s volume, make them mute to you. Imagine you can turn someone’s words into physical hooks, so you could see them for what they were. Imagine you simply chose not to bite them.

Visualize. Imagine a physical rope tying you to someone, and imagine cutting that rope. Imagine standing on an iceberg with someone, and it breaks apart, allowing you both to drift in other directions.

Visualize. You take all of your pain, all of your fury, and you unleash it upon a simple grey rock in a field. The rock is utterly unaffected. If you were to take the rock’s entire existence and view it condensed over a day, all your fury wouldn’t even be a blip on the screen.

Visualize. Imagine clenching your fist around a shard of glass. The harder you tense, the more you bleed. The greater your effort, the greater your pain. Imagine the relief when you simply open your hand and release.

Release.

There is no sadder state of existence than being defined by hatred. If your entire identity revolves around things you dislike, are against, or want destroyed: find something to love. Hate does not destroy hate. Put some joy out there. Like something instead.