When your gas light comes on, you don’t floor it. You stop for gas.

Before you get completely burnt out, there are signs. Indicators that you need to refuel. Most of the time, those indicators come in the form of decreased productivity or efficiency. So what do a lot of us do half the time? We work harder to compensate!

That makes as much sense as flooring it when the gas light comes on.

One of the problems I see is that for a lot of people, they don’t actually know what refuels them. They default to “not working,” but for a lot of people (myself included!) that makes us feel worse. Lazing around my house doesn’t refuel me at all.

What refuels me, specifically, is productive time spent on something totally self-indulgent – but productive nonetheless. Tinkering with my camping loadout. Organizing my board game shelf. Building a piece of furniture that I want. Stuff like that. When I come away from that, I feel totally refreshed and ready to floor it again.

It took a while to figure that out, though. Like lots of people, I assumed that if I was feeling burnt out, what I needed was just rest. So I would set aside a day to do nothing… and feel like garbage.

Some people need “R&R.” Other people recharge with social activity. Still others renew themselves with a physical reward of some kind. There are plenty of different ways to fuel up. But the one thing that never works is putting the pedal to the metal and trying to make it on fumes. The fumes run out. Fuel up.

Here is an undervalued but incredibly effective tool for rapport- and relationship-building: learn to summarize.

Whenever you meet and interact with someone for more than a few moments, the information transfer is dense. Many words are spoken, and not all of them are retained. If at the end of the meeting, you can summarize what happened in one or two sentences, you add tremendous value.

You add value because you show that you listened. You show that you paid attention and cared. Because the last moment of an experience is often the one most saliently remembered, a final summary can really help the meeting live in the other person’s mind.

You can summarize easily while also expressing gratitude, and also building a bridge to the next interaction: “Hey, thanks again for meeting today! I’m really glad we got to finalize what we want to do about the book launch and initial print run. I’m really looking forward to the art team meeting with you next week!” It doesn’t have to be awkward – in fact, it can be downright smile-inducing.

And if you make it a habit, it really will make you pay better attention. Your memory will sharpen. You’ll listen better. All valuable things, while building better relationships – business or personal.

So, to summarize: summarize!

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” This is some true stuff! But combine it with something else that’s true: in many cases, great opportunities require lots of time but little else. We don’t take those opportunities because the opportunity cost in time is so high.

But if the opportunity cost were reduced, not because the project takes less time overall but because you enjoy that time on its own, then you’ve built a real opportunity machine.

What are things you spend time on now – and what real opportunities might be hidden inside those hours?

There’s nothing wrong with pushing yourself. But you have to pull yourself back as well!

Your natural cadence is probably good for most days, but days aren’t all the same. Some days require more from you, and that’s okay. But some days require less – and it can be just as challenging to pull yourself back from the ledge, to make yourself slow.

If you only push something, you knock it over. If you push a little here, pull a little there – you balance it. You get it just right.

You really do get to choose the journey, even if you don’t always get to pick the destination. But your travel arrangements are always up to you. You can crawl or you can fly. You can skip or you can trudge. You can meander or you can drive.

Remember, every destination is just the starting point for the next leg of the journey.

As someone who worked in the world of “jobs” in one way or another for many years, something always bugged me. Why is the model always “companies post jobs, and then workers pitch themselves?”

See, I think there’s actually a lot of merit to the reverse, as a system. When I was a recruiter, I was very proactive – I sought people out to pitch roles to them. I generally posted job ads as a last resort. The result was definitely more work, but also much more success on my part. Better matches between worker and role, longer tenure in the resulting relationships, etc.

But I’ve realized why it was more work, and why most people don’t do it this way. Because, as a rule, people with less information seek connections in the direction of people with more information, not the reverse.

On average, before any connection has been made, a candidate knows a lot more about a company & role than the company knows about the candidate. Most people are ghosts, with zero ability to find out anything about them unless they volunteer that information to you. This means a company can’t really seek out candidates, because candidates aren’t advertising!

As a recruiter, my method of proactively seeking candidates had one major flaw – I could only ever hope to find candidates who were sending up smoke signals. People who, whether they were actively looking for work or not, were advertising their skill set in some way. People who were writing articles, giving talks, or being active in community spaces. Visible people.

The bad news for the world is that unless this becomes something virtually everyone does – put up more professional information about them than the average company puts up about the average role – then the system itself is unlikely to change. (And this is a shame because the average company puts almost no meaningful information out there about themselves or the roles they’re hiring for, but that’s still more than most candidates advertise about themselves, as a rule.)

The good news for you is that being the exception to that rule gives you incredible leverage. If you create more public information about you than the average employer creates about themselves, then the informational gravity starts pulling the other way.

Make yourself findable – I promise you, people are looking.

How joyous it is, when our problems are weird and new!

I’m middle-aged, and still the world can throw me curveballs. Problems that I haven’t had to deal with before. You think you’ve seen it all? Ha! Life keeps on living, dragging you along.

And how fun! By and large, the world has 100 joys for every sorrow. So if the world can throw a new problem at me that I’ve never encountered, then how many more joys must be just around the corner? How much more life is there to live, even on days when you think all the fun is behind you?

Let each new rock you stub your toe on remind you that the rock fell from a brand new mountain to climb.

When people first try to learn about a new topic, I think they often discourage themselves by trying to learn for mastery, instead of learning for “productive curiosity.”

Think of it like this: if you want to acquire a bunch of new objects, there’s something you need first: storage solutions. You need boxes for transportation, shelves for organization. You need somewhere to put all that stuff, and you need that place to meaningfully allow you to use that stuff effectively in the future.

Imagine you want to buy a whole new set of tools. If you walk to the hardware store and bring no means of transportation, it will be difficult to come back with tools! Even if they put the ones you want in bags for you, that’s a lot of stuff to carry in flimsy bags. And if you DO get all that back to your workshop, you don’t just want to dump every item you bought into one big pile on the floor – that wouldn’t make it very easy to use the tools in the future!

So, when you want to learn about something new, don’t focus on just memorizing as many facts as you can get your hands on. That’s like a big pile of unorganized tools. First, focus on a macro view – learn the specific jargon and language of the new topic. Go to where people go to ask questions about that topic and see the frequently asked ones. And see who answers! Dedicate some notebook space or specific files for the things you’ll learn, and to store links to things you want to learn later. It’s more important to identify the top five online sources of information about that topic than to find the first one and just start reading or watching everything in that one.

The point isn’t to try to memorize your way to mastery. It’s to give yourself the space to meaningfully absorb new information at a pace that keeps it useful to you. It’s to be able to engage intelligently with anything new you encounter. If you try the “rapid reading” technique, then you hit barriers where lots of information is dependent on other information you don’t have yet, so you keep running into brick walls unless you absorb everything in the exact correct order (and order which, of course, you don’t know). But if you first build the scaffolding, understand the context a little, then no matter what information you encounter you can learn a little from it and put it into the overall jigsaw puzzle, to be connected later as you fill in more and more gaps.

Pay attention to why different people want the information and how they use it. Know what kinds of filters are being applied – for instance, both a car salesman and a mechanic might know a lot about cars, but that information will come to you very differently depending on which source you ask a question. But if you don’t even know that there are such things as car salesmen and mechanics yet, then you aren’t prepared to intelligently get new information from either, even if they obviously have information to give you.

Context is key. Most of the time, it’s easy to get the rough shape of it if you take a little time to look. So if you’re headed for a new topic, take at least a little pause to climb up and get the lay of the land. Everything else from then on will be so much more effective.

Happy Easter, everyone. Don’t make days like these a chore – it’s too easy to do. If you aren’t enjoying this, really living it, then cut out errands until you are. Be present. I’m happy that I am.

It’s amazing what can happen when you change around what you consider to be “default assumptions.”

Are things forbidden unless permitted, or permitted unless forbidden? If you invite multiple people to something, do you assume people are coming unless they say they aren’t, or that they aren’t coming unless they say they are?

It’s amazing how much can be miscommunicated simply because the default assumptions are different. They’re so big they’re invisible. They rule your life, but you don’t even realize it – and you really don’t realize it when you don’t share them with someone else.

They also affect the message you want to send. Telling a child that they aren’t allowed to touch anything unless it’s a designated “toy” that’s been assigned to them creates a very different environment than one where the only things they can’t touch are the things they’ve been told not to, like a knife or stove.

Your mileage may vary, of course. But examine your defaults, especially when they run into someone else’s and conflict occurs. That’s a great moment of enlightenment.