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!

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.