A snowglobe has a few ounces of water in it. Somewhere between 50 and 100 little flakes of fake snow. You shake it, and the little flakes swirl around.

You know what’s interesting? None of those components change. It’s completely sealed; a closed system. The water doesn’t change, the flakes don’t change. Nothing new is ever added, nothing is ever removed.

And yet, every single time you shake it, something slightly different happens. The swirl of the snowflakes is never exactly the same. The movement of the water is unique each time. Shake it a billion times, and that will always be true.

When we feel like we’re stuck in a rut, we so often want to rush out and pull all these new things into our lives. There’s nothing inherently wrong with new things, mind you, but they need space – physical space for physical objects, time for experiences, attention for interests. All things you have in finite quantities. If you don’t have a solid system to clear out as much as you bring in (and few people do), you end up with clutter and chaos, causing you even more stress. Stress you feel like you need to escape, so you look for something new…

You don’t always need that. Rearranging the things you already have can be wondrous. Give your life a new shake – go to the same places in a different order, move your furniture around, call three of your existing friends from different circles to all hang out. Before you try to cram more into your existence, let what you already have swirl a few more times.

When you’re trying to prioritize a to-do list, especially one for a packed but short period like a busy day or week, there are plenty of ways you can go. You can prioritize the things with the highest impact first. You can put the most urgent things at the top; those with the shortest time horizon. A particularly bad but oh-so-appealing method is to prioritize the things that the loudest people are yelling at you about.

But here’s the method I prefer: prioritize the things that are weighing on you the most. The things that are causing you stress.

Here’s why: imagine that you have to run a hundred-meter dash, but with special rules. You have to carry 10 heavy objects, each of different weight from 1 pound to 10 pounds. Every ten meters of the race you can put one object down. Which would you choose first?

Of course, you’d go in descending order of heaviness. If you ditch anything other than the 10 lb. weight first, that’s extra weight you have to carry for more distance for no reason.

Stress is a physical weight, and don’t let anybody tell you differently. Shed the heaviest chains first, and free yourself to gain strength and momentum as you go.

The last time you learned some amazing new way of doing things – a new skill, maybe a new mindset, something – you might have said “holy cow, I’ve been doing this wrong my whole life!”

Look at the insidious way negativity tries to take over even your most joyous moments! You discover something that changes the trajectory of your whole future in a positive way, and the first thought is how it retroactively makes your past worse.

Okay, a quick aside. Imagine some genie offers you a bargain. The genie will rewrite the memories of your own past such that you are in chronic pain for every moment before the present. Nothing will actually be different – all the same stuff will have happened, including your own actions – but you’ll remember being in pain along with everything else. That change only applies to the past up to the moment of the bargain, and in exchange, all your future moments will be marked by an equivalent amount of joy on top of whatever else the moment would have produced naturally.

Let me tell you: that is a ridiculously good bargain, and I would take it in a heartbeat. Which is to say: even if I could make my past retroactively worse in exchange for increased future happiness, I would do so – because I’m already done with the past. Of course, no such bargain exists. Your past is immutable.

You weren’t doing something “wrong your whole life.” You were doing what you knew how to do in a universe where humans aren’t born omniscient. There are a million things that, if I had done them or learned them sooner in my life, would have made my current life better. So what? I didn’t know those things then, maybe I couldn’t even have learned them until I knew other things. Maybe there really was no way for my path to have shaken out except for the way it did. We’ll never know, so it’s not worth dwelling on.

Instead, take your joy! Look at the vast, uncountable days of your future and how they are now bending ever higher towards sublime inspiration with each new door you unlock, each new piece of wisdom you claim. No matter how dark the clouds of your past may be, do not let them darken you once you’ve left them! You have escaped their shadow into today and tomorrow, and no power on Earth can force you to carry their darkness with you unless you choose to.

Imagine that you took every physical possession you owned and put it in one big pile. That’s not a very useful way to store and organize those items! That possibility technically exists for you now; no one is stopping you from doing that. You probably just don’t want to.

Okay, so now imagine that after some prankster has done that to you, and you’re tasked with cleaning it all up and reorganizing it back into your house from the front lawn. Let’s look at a way you could organize things differently than you probably do now – let’s organize by color!

That room at the end of the hall? That’s now the Blue Room. Everything you own that’s blue is going in that room. The blue clothes you have, in there. Blueberries? In there. Your toothbrush goes in there, because it’s blue. One of your blankets goes in there, as does that set of blue dishes you own.

Now we get to the green room. Your plants go in there, and so do your toothpaste and a lot of the vegetables. Your cash goes in there as well as your favorite hoodie.

And so on.

This would be pretty horrible. Yet so organized! The rooms might even be ascetically pleasing, neat to look at. But that’s it. They certainly wouldn’t be organized for use.

That’s how you organize things – or at least, how most people try. They put stuff together based on what gets used together, and they put that stuff where it will likely get used.

You could store all your food, cooking utensils, and serving ware in the bedroom. It would all be together, which is nice, but it would still be mostly useless. You store that stuff in the kitchen because that’s where the stove is, so that’s where you’ll cook. I don’t keep my automotive tools in the basement, because I can’t get my car down there to work on it.

So things have to be both (a) stored in useful groups and (b) in useful places. Got it.

Now, think about how you store non-physical things.

Do they all go in a big pile on your front lawn? I’ve seen enough of other people’s desktops to know that the answer is “yes” for a decent number of people.

Do they all go somewhere that’s organized in a way that’s very pretty to look at and is utterly counter-productive for usefulness?

Or do you put things where you’ll use them?

(Inspiration credit: I’m currently reading the absolutely amazing book Building A Second Brain by Tiago Forte, and so should you.)

A very old monk, whose spine was bent and breath was short, knew that his days upon the Earth were numbered, and the number was low. With one of his last remaining days, he chose to walk along the path outside his temple, planting fig trees.

A young man saw the old monk and recognized what he was doing. He asked the old monk why he chose to plant fig trees, which will not bear fruit for at least five years. Surely the old monk will never taste the fruit of his own labors, but he might live to see the harvest of this year – so why not plant something that will produce fruit in that time?

“Because,” said the old monk, smiling wryly, “I do whatever the fuck I want.”

I often think that society tends to be bad at making positive trade-offs. Even setting aside how bad people are at correctly evaluating things like this, people will generally only support something that (they think) has 100% good effects. For instance, let’s say there are two health policies on the table and people have to vote for one of them: Policy A will save 10 lives per year from heart disease. Policy B will save 100 lives per year from heart disease but result in 1 extra death per year from cancer. People will vote for Policy A, despite the superiority of Policy B, because people focus way more on “causes 1 death” than “saves 100 lives.”

In other words, people are bad at trade-offs.

But you know what? This isn’t just about public policy stuff. People – and I’m absolutely including myself – are bad at this concept even in their personal lives.

I’m always looking for win/win scenarios. I love finding ways to improve multiple things at once. But you can’t do that all the time, and thinking you can will make you overlook even very beneficial win/lose scenarios. Those scenarios can be amazing as long as the win is bigger than the loss. Maybe it’s just fine to take some time off from your side business in order to build that deck that you want. Maybe it’s just fine to slow your personal reading pace in order to spend an extra afternoon with a dear friend.

You can’t win ’em all, as they say. But if you’re willing to lose a little, you’re more likely to get to pick how you do so. That’s a win all by itself.

Sometimes you find yourself saying “now’s not the right time.” Usually, in response to some suggestion of an activity, you might say this because you have a general sense of unease about it. As a rule, “general sense of unease” isn’t a great lodestar without some refinement.

When someone wants to challenge you on that statement, they might say, “why not?” But that’s the wrong question. The right question is: “when is the right time?”

That’s the right question because if you have a genuine answer for that, then that answer will include the answer to “why isn’t now the right time.” And if you don’t have a genuine answer for that, then you don’t really feel like now isn’t the right time – you have some other reason for not wanting to do it at all, or else you’re just letting fear or some other negative emotion get in the way.

So the next time you find yourself saying that you definitely want to do something, but “now isn’t the right time,” challenge yourself to specify when the right time is, and commit to doing it at that time. If you can’t – then just do it now!

“I don’t have time to sharpen my axe. I need to chop this tree down.”

Most people encounter some version of this problem. I understand it completely. If you value the sentiment “you don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great” (as I do), then you’re usually pressuring yourself to get started. At the same time, lots of other people are pressuring you to do that same thing!

See, this is part of the problem. “Sharpening the axe” absolutely is starting, but it doesn’t look like starting. It’s less visible to others, and it’s less visceral to you. If you spend four hours of a six-hour project sharpening the axe, then at the three-hour-and-fifty-nine-minute mark, it doesn’t look like you’ve made any progress at all. Because people are looking at the tree, not the axe.

Getting paid only further complicates things. If someone pays you to chop down a tree and they’re a particularly short-sighted person, they might actually be upset to check in on you and find you sharpening your axe. After all, that benefits you (since you’re sharpening your own axe), and they’re paying you to work for them! They’re not paying you to sharpen your own axe!

You have to stand firm against this sort of short-sightedness. You have to remind people on occasion that chopping with a dull axe makes you a bad investment. You have to remind yourself sometimes, too.

There are a lot of things I like. My favorite book is The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite movie is The Royal Tenenbaums, and my favorite album is Pink Floyd’s The Wall. I really really like all three of those things. But I’ve also met lots of other people who liked them that I didn’t particularly get along with.

In other words, the single data point of “Loves The Wall” isn’t enough to guarantee that I’ll like someone. No matter what thing you like, the same is probably true for you – liking that same thing isn’t, by itself, enough to ensure that you’ll adore that person.

So why assume the opposite is true?

Look, there’s also stuff I really dislike. Lots of stuff! But someone else liking that thing shouldn’t be enough to guarantee that I’ll dislike this person, that they have no redeeming qualities that I might find enjoyable or beneficial.

I’m not one end of a magnet, perfectly repelling all of one category and perfectly attracting all of another. Neither are you. Neither is anyone unless they’ve taken great effort to become so. Don’t carve out humanity so swiftly.

Imagine a person who really, really hates Thursdays. They think they’re terrible and want everyone else to believe it, too. In their ideal world, the week would have six days.

Now imagine that this person trips and breaks their arm on a Thursday. What do you think will be the first thing they blame? The loose carpet? The fact that they were distracted by an important phone call? The badly-placed bike rack that broke their fall?

Or the fact that it was Thursday?

No situation has a single cause. Surrounding every event is a swarm of causes, many of which interacted in exact ways to produce the event in question and many of which had (and this is the tricky part) no impact whatsoever.

This is a nuanced (read: unpopular) view, but it’s the truth. When something bad happens, you can’t pick the thing you already hate and declare that the only and ultimate cause, ignoring all other factors. Even if the thing you hate was a factor at all (and there’s no guarantee of that), it absolutely wasn’t the only factor.

If we want to reduce bad things, we have to make it about the bad things, not the factor we just hate for whatever reason. This is, for many people, super-duper hard. I get that you want to believe that every bad thing was caused by the singular factor you don’t like. But it wasn’t. And your life will be better when you get out from under that blanket.