There’s this certain sub-genre of science fiction that I always loved. Stories where the main protagonist suddenly wakes up in a completely different identity than their own and has to make it work. Usually, that’s how the story will begin – the point of view will be the narrator’s, and they’ll describe hearing an unfamiliar name called several times with increasing urgency until they realize that the shouter is calling them. They won’t recognize anything about their surroundings – even their body will be unfamiliar. They’ll have no idea how it happened, but suddenly now they’re General Bashar of the Fourth Space Army or whatever instead of their “true” identity. And then the rest of the story will be about them making it work, achieving their ends, etc. instead of ending up in the loony bin or being executed as an impostor.

The key central theme of these stories is that of initial acceptance of the situation. That’s what makes the stories heroic. The protagonist could easily just yell “Wait! I’m not General Bashar! I’m just some nobody who is suddenly and improbably thrust into his life!” And if the main character did that, not only would it probably not end well for the character but there also wouldn’t be much of a story. Even if that’s what they want to do initially, they always quickly realize that their only hope is to play along. Though they had absolutely no control over the life they stepped into, they have to do what they can with it, looking for opportunities to get what they want out of what they’ve been handed.

Okay, that’s a weird intro, but here’s the point: you’re living this, every day. Every day you wake up in an identity whose past you cannot affect. The fact that this identity was created by earlier versions of you is totally immaterial. The point is that today, right now, you’re waking up in this identity and you have to figure out how to maximize it. How to get what you want out of what you’ve been given. You have to put the clues together about what this life is all about and then pilot it around until you successfully achieve your goals.

The protagonists in this story always have a very specific but subtle superpower that gives them the ability to win: they care 0% about their past, and 100% about their future. Since the past of this identity doesn’t “belong” to them, they don’t care about it. They don’t consider themselves beholden to the opinions of the “real” General Bashar from yesterday, they only act like him in order to move forward towards their goals. If General Bashar spent every single day of his life lovingly tending to his rock collection, the protagonist is totally okay never looking at another rock unless it brings him closer to his current goals.

That’s a power we should aspire to! The past is nothing more than the starting conditions of our adventure. It gave us the current setup, but it is now unable to affect us and we’re unable to affect it. If we want something new, that new thing is in the future, not the past.

But instead, we carry stress. Stress, regret, fear. We’re tense over things that already happened, that we cannot change and which don’t matter. They’ve already done their damage, even if the damage hasn’t happened yet.

If our enemies have launched the missiles but they haven’t yet arrived, then what happened in the past is certainly going to affect us. But we can’t change the launching, we can only prepare for the arrival of the missiles. The starting conditions can lead to all sorts of conclusions, and you can affect those paths. But you can’t affect the starting conditions at all, so don’t try. Remove your attachment to them. Think of yourself as a new arrival in your own life, every single day. Make your decisions accordingly.

You can’t create nothing. But that’s what you attempt when you tell someone else not to do something: you attempt to create a vacuum.

Nature abhors a vacuum. This is an old trick, but try this: don’t think about pink elephants.

You thought about pink elephants, didn’t you? Of course you did. What else could you think about? But you didn’t think about gold-plated tire swings. If I didn’t want you to think about gold-plated tire swings, I’d say something like “don’t think about pink elephants.”

Because you can’t create a vacuum. You can’t create an absence of something like that.

Okay, let’s go deeper: if you’re a parent, you’ve probably heard of the concept of “screen time.” Maybe even if you aren’t one! The idea is that too much time spent in front of electronics is probably bad for developing brains and the habits that they’re forming, so maybe you should limit how much time kids spend on things like tablets or whatever. And the parents who adhere to this theory do that by putting maximums on screen usage – like, “you can’t be on your tablet more than an hour a day,” or whatever. There are even built-in parental controls for most tablets that let you automate this feature; your kids’ screens will just go dark after whatever pre-set daily limit you create.

I have never done this. I have never limited my kids’ screen time… at least, not directly. Because I try very hard to avoid parenting through “don’ts.” Kids encounter far too many don’ts, in my opinion – adults, too. I eschew them in favor of “elses” – as in, “something else.”

It rained today. A lot. My kids, after dinner, had picked up their tablets to wind down a bit; the day was nearly over and it had been full of fun activities like painting and other crafts. There was maybe an hour or an hour and a half before I was going to send the kiddos to bed, and I didn’t really want them spending all that time on their tablets, especially right before trying to sleep. So instead I said “Hey kids. take off everything but your shorts and you can go run around outside and get as wet and muddy as you want. When it’s time to come in, I’ll dunk you in the tub before bedtime.”

I have never met a kid that would pick tablets over “parent-endorsed, unfettered mud play.” They were out the door like a shot. They were having so much fun, in fact, that they ended up staying awake almost an hour past their normal bedtime (gasp!), but those days are too short as it is.

You can’t create a vacuum, but you can fill space – by and large, you can fill it with whatever you want. Whether it’s children or adults, don’t list off the things they can’t do and then wonder why they seem to keep coming back to those things. Give them a few encouraging ideas for what they can do and watch them fly.

What’s up?

You’ve probably heard that a thousand times or more. It’s a pretty standard greeting, and it has a sort of formulaic answer: “Nothing much, how about you?”

You probably give that answer (or something very close to it) as reflexively as you’d say “who’s there” when someone says “knock knock.” Let me offer you a powerful tool: change up the reflexive language. Turn it into something meaningful, and watch your world change.

Early in my career, I had a manager who, when asked “what’s up,” would enthusiastically answer: “Everything!” It was a superpower. Immediately, the whole tone of the conversation would shift. He’d have their attention, their excitement. They’d break out of dull, automatic conversational ruts and ask him what he meant – and they’d genuinely care about the answer. He’d be able then to talk about anything he wanted: new projects, exciting ideas, whatever was on his mind at that moment.

That simple change turned a poorly-used corner of human interaction and transformed it into a real connection.

Just today, as my co-workers and I were parting ways from a large team meeting, one of them said “Create a great weekend, everyone!” If she had said, “have a great weekend,” that would have been perfectly fine, perfectly nice – and everyone would have forgotten about it instantly, as you always do with pleasant but standard conversation cues. But by changing that one word, she turned it into a meaningful statement. It carries the same pleasant kindness, but also shares a value, highlights a philosophy. It gives meaningful advice and illustrates something about her, as well. In short, it’s a thousand times more impactful, using the same number of words, in the same conversational corner.

A hundred times a day you have little exchanges like these; pleasant but meaningless. There’s nothing wrong with them, of course. But if you want to try a little something new, this is an easy change – with a big impact.

You do not have any spare time. Ever. And neither does anyone else. Keep that in mind when you ask things of people. Anything you ask someone to do must necessitate them not doing something else, and that “something else” was already on the docket.

Opportunity Cost is real, and doubly so for time over any other resource. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever ask someone for a favor without feeling guilty about it. It just means to be respectful of the fact that you’re really asking two favors: you’re asking them to do something, and you’re implicitly asking them not to do something else.

Imagine your weirdest friend or acquaintance. That person who has some pretty “out-there” worldviews and opinions, lots of unusual interests, and maybe grew up in a bubble that’s pretty different from yours. They’re not a bad person, but they’re definitely strange. They also have a pretty high opinion of their own importance and intelligence. Lots of people know someone like this – if you don’t, just imagine it.

Now imagine a world where all of your information about things that happen outside of your own sphere of direct observation comes from this one person. Other than what you see and hear with your own eyes and ears, all the rest of your news and information comes from your weird friend. They decide what to tell you about, and they tell you about it through the lens of their own personality, experiences, and objectives.

That would be super strange, right? They’d only tell you what they thought was important, which would probably be very different from what you’d objectively like to know. You’d be getting everything filtered through their value system, all the narratives that surround the facts would be from their perspective (even if the facts themselves were faithfully reported), and all context would be dependent on the other stories they told you. You would have no way of knowing what else was happening or other perspectives; you wouldn’t even know there were other perspectives. Since you’d have no way of knowing what anyone else was interested in, you’d be led to believe that this was what everyone was interested in. And if your weird friend presented themselves as just someone giving you information, you’d never even realize how much of your worldview was being shaped to match that of this one very odd person. They’d become neutral in your eyes for lack of any reason to believe otherwise.

So if you’re imagining your entire worldview being shaped by your one weird uncle’s Facebook feed, that’s the idea. You probably think that would be very weird, indeed! But you only think that because you have a counterfactual to consider – you’re comparing this weird hypothetical situation to the world as it actually exists. But the point I’m making is… well, that’s the point. You currently live in that weird hypothetical. You just don’t know it’s weird, for exactly the reason that you’ve always lived in it.

The weird friend isn’t necessarily malicious. They might not be lying to you deliberately or intending to manipulate you. But they don’t need to! They’re just weird, and you’re getting all your info filtered through that strangeness. That’s all it takes.

However diverse you think your sources of external information are, they are not diverse enough to avoid this. They couldn’t be, unless you were getting your information from at least a few billion sources. Lots of information can be wrong, and everyone is essentially someone else’s weird friend with their own agenda. So diversify your friends more, trust each one less, and most importantly, don’t ever let someone else become the “neutral” source in your mind. There’s no such thing.

Carrying water across the desert is a tricky proposition. You need water to live, so you have to carry some. But the more you carry, the more difficult your journey becomes – and thus, the more water you need. Rockets have the same problem; fuel is heavy, so the more fuel you’re carrying, the more you need.

You have to find the right balance between the weight you carry and what that weight gives you.

When you carry other people’s water for them, the calculation changes significantly. That’s a lot of weight to drag across the desert when that weight isn’t giving you any additional ability to do so.

Sometimes there are very good reasons to carry water for other people. But always make sure of two things: One, that the people are worth carrying water for. Two, that it actually is water – and not just rocks.

An old story about my grandfather came to my mind last night, and it made me want to write a blog post about it. Something that I’ve learned after years of writing a daily blog is that my actual memory pales in comparison to the volumes I’ve written (in fact, that’s kind of the point), so I habitually check to see if I’ve written about things before whenever I want to write about something from the past instead of a current thought. Turns out, I had written about this already (of course).

My father repeated his best stories often. Of course, he had a million stories to begin with and he was a phenomenal teller of these tales, so I never minded. In fact, I’d even get upset if someone else interrupted a story I’d heard a thousand times – I was enraptured by the telling. There was humor and wisdom in these stories. And part of me knew that there was something special about the way I was hearing them, something that couldn’t be duplicated even as we recorded his best ones.

I’m glad we did, but I don’t let those recordings replace retellings. When my own children need to hear those stories, I won’t dig through old videos to find them. Those videos are for me, for my nostalgia, for my homage to one of the greats. But for my children, I’ll retell the stories myself. I’ll say, “One time, your Pop-pop…” and go from there. Because the power of these stories is the telling, the connection, the questions they raise and the answers I’ll give. It’s in the inspiration to go make new stories, by living a life worthy of retelling.

My own benchmark for whether or not I was living a good life was always whether or not that life generated things I’d want to tell my father about. If something happened and I immediately thought “I can’t wait to tell this to Dad…” then I knew things were going– well, not always well, but at least According To Plan, in some sense. The way of the world was as it should be.

Now, that same benchmark still exists, but it’s whether or not I’d want to tell my kids. They’re old enough for real stories now, and I love telling as much as they love listening. My dad’s own father passed away before my dad had any kids himself, so for him, that threshold was forced. He never got to make the decision whether or not a story should go up the generational chain or down it. My transition had more overlap – all of my children got to meet their grandfather, got to know him, got to build an understanding of the power of those stories. He trained them to listen to old stories, to hang on those words waiting for a punchline or a moral or just the joy of hearing. Now they listen to me like they listened to him. Like I listened to him.

Power in the old stories. Never stop telling them. I write mine here just like I tell them, but don’t ever let this be the only way they exist. If you’re (somehow) reading this fifty years from now, don’t just read it. Go find my kids, and their kids, and maybe their kids – and listen to the stories yourself. They’ll be better, I promise.

It really is good to have productive, professional work that you do because you’re passionate about it. And to be clear, I’m talking about work that you’re purposely being under-compensated for.

Why is that good? Well, because it’s a different kind of work. Different work means different results, and it’s good to know what your own work is like when viewed from different angles. Your ability to work is like a particular kind of machine, and it will produce different outputs with different inputs. One kind of input is “being paid to do this,” and another kind is “you want to do this enough that not being paid for it is okay.”

That’s also different than hobbies or things like that, though. I’m still talking about work. Just a different kind. Like, this blog doesn’t count – this is passion work, for sure, but this is by me and for me. I’m talking about if I was writing content like this for someone else’s website, and either not getting paid, or getting paid less than what I could command.

So… why do that? Well, because for one – it can help you discover what things you care about enough to do that. And two, it can help you command the process of discovering and utilizing that process.

You see, lots of other people want to convince you that their passion should be your passion, and thus that you should use your skills on their project because of that passion. Instead of, you know, for money. Sometimes you should! But it should be because you genuinely do have a great desire to do that work and see its results. But if you’ve never engaged with a passion project before – how will you know what it looks like? How will you avoid being conned?

So do a little bit of passion work. Do it on your terms. Seek it out. Don’t let someone else sell it to you. Find it yourself, and play with it. You can even find some other ways to get compensated, while you’re at it. But learn what it looks and feels like to work on something you believe in, because it really is great to do when it works.

Sometimes, the world conspires to prevent you from accomplishing your tasks. Sometimes, random events just change the calculus a little.

You could plan to mow the lawn on Saturday, but then it rains. Technically, you still could mow the lawn… but it’s certainly a lot less appealing. But what you probably shouldn’t do is stand around looking at the lawnmower.

There are only three jobs. In any industry, in any organization – there are only three jobs. Everyone that works has a variation on one of these three, and understanding this concept can be of incredible value to you.

Here’s what they are:

1. Some people Bring Money In. Every business needs resources, even charities and non-profits. There is always someone whose job it is to bring that money in. Salespeople, marketers, fundraisers, and everyone like them or part of their ecosystem. They have the job of bringing money in the front door.
2. Some people Keep Money In. Money is constantly trying to escape the organization. If too much of it does, the venture fails. And so some people have the job of preventing that escape. Lawyers do this when they prevent lawsuits. HR people do this when they prevent turnover of employees. Cybersecurity people do this when they prevent security hacks. Procurement people do this when they negotiate lower prices for raw materials. Customer service people do this when they keep clients from leaving due to bad experiences. Accountants do this… well, pretty much always. But all these people are really just using different tools to do the same job: keep money.
3. Lastly, some people Fix Things That Break. Most businesses are doing things that are actually really simple, except fires keep starting and someone has to put them out. This one sometimes confuses people, because they think: “Wait, my job is to load blank postcards into the postcard printer so that printed ones come out the other side. I’m not fixing anything!” Oh, but you are. Imagine what would happen if you didn’t show up to work: the postcard machine wouldn’t have blank cards, so nothing would get printed, and nothing would get shipped. That’s a major problem – and you solve it. And you probably solve a thousand little problems along the way, like when the machine jams or when the shipment of blank cards is late or when they were cut incorrectly and don’t fit or whatever. But the point is that every business ever was perfect on day one, except for all the problems that keep cropping up – machines breaking, industries shifting, competitors cropping up, etc. Someone has to fix those problems.

So that’s it. If you work, then you do one of those things. Why is this incredible oversimplification both true and helpful?

Because most people are really bad at understanding, and thus even worse at talking about their own value.

Most people think of their job in its exact, literal terms. They think of their job as what they do, where they do it, what industry it’s in, what tools they use, etc. They think in such ultra-specific terms that the thing they’re currently doing starts to feel like the only thing they can do. They think, even unconsciously, that their only value is in being a very, very specific cog and that they could only change maybe one tiny aspect to do something very adjacent.

Not true! First, realize that you have one of the three jobs listed above (you actually might have more than one – if you’re a solopreneur, you have all three!). Figure out which it is. Do you bring money in, keep money in, or fix something that breaks? Okay, now how does what you do specifically help further that goal – or to put it another way, how would achieving that goal be hindered if you just stopped working? Now you have a much clearer picture of the value you add to an organization!

Understanding the value you add in broader terms helps you advocate for yourself. It helps you grow. It helps you learn and improve. In just about every way imaginable, it’s better for you to look at things this way – so take some time and think about it!