Let me describe a particular kind of mental trap to you.

You imagine a long arc of events that leads to a specific goal. Then, you miss or fail at an early part of that arc, and so you forever believe you missed your chance at the end goal. You write it off because of the early misstep, never realizing that there may have been a million other ways to reach that goal besides the main arc.

For instance, you might dream of one day becoming a famous director. You imagine the whole journey – start with film school, then onto some prestigious apprenticeships with brilliant filmmakers. You gain credit and reputation in the industry by working on a few projects that win film festival awards and you network with the larger studios. Soon you’re leading your own small projects that are released to critical acclaim. The studios court you for larger projects and before you know it you’re the next Speilberg.

And then… your application to film school gets rejected, so you get a job at the video store in the mall and that’s that.

But if you actually go and look at every person who became a famous filmmaker, many of them didn’t follow that arc at all. And if you were to look at all the people who failed to become famous filmmakers, many of them did follow that arc. Particular paths may have stronger or weaker correlations with successfully getting to the end, but nothing is perfect, nothing is guaranteed. Plan, but plan loosely – and adapt if you have to.

Your dreams are more resilient than you think.

Happy anniversary to me!

I don’t really ascribe much importance to annual anniversaries, but it’s nice to reflect on the fact that I’ve continued to grow this particular garden. It’s borne a lot of interesting fruit in the last year; I’ve been paid to write more and had a few other interesting opportunities come my way specifically as a result of the writing. I’ve had more people reach out to me in a positive way about something they read here, and even had some requests. It’s been an opportunity to connect.

Thank you very much for reading, for being a part of this. I write primarily for myself and for my children (who I hope will someday be glad that their father recorded his thoughts like this), but the positive externality is the connection I get to build with so many other people – near and far, known and unknown. Thank you for being one of them. I hope that connection always grows.

Until tomorrow, my friends.

If a tear in the fabric of spacetime appeared in front of you and deposited an 18-year-old version of you into your living room, would you immediately give that person complete control over your life? Would you let them make all decisions in your life?

I would probably be dead inside of a week if I did that. I’d certainly be broke, and probably also some sort of a social pariah. So no, I don’t want 18-year-old-Johnny in charge of my life.

A surprising number of people, however, allow themselves to be completely chained by decisions their 18-year-old self made.

When you were a teenager, you made some assumptions about the world and chose a political affiliation as a result. Ever since, you’ve held it without reexamining it. Maybe your teenage self chose to spend a few (hundred) thousand dollars on getting sorted into a particular career path. Teenage you agreed to go get shot and shoot back. Something.

Some of those things came with obligations you can’t undo. You have to pay back student loans, serve the term of your enlistment, and deal with the silly tattoo you got of a political slogan. But you don’t have to renew those obligations!

You don’t have to give those decisions a single ounce more weight than they already have. You don’t have to stay in the career just because you paid a high entrance fee. You don’t have to reenlist if you don’t want. You don’t have to keep voting the way a tattoo or a t-shirt you got as a teenager tells you to.

In other words, that teenager isn’t in charge of you. Don’t chain yourself to who you were when you didn’t know who you would someday be.

A common phrase in our everyday parlance is “failing miserably.” People usually use that phrase to mean “failing very very badly,” but that doesn’t have to automatically equate to misery.

The person who comes in last in a race, but with both joy in their heart and a solid plan to learn and improve, did not “fail miserably.” The person who got the silver, missing gold by a fraction of a second, and is a mean-spirited spoilsport about it and blames the world for robbing them of a gold medal they surely “deserved” is the one who failed miserably.

Life has a natural, built-in catch-up mechanic: failures teach us more than successes. We just have to be willing to accept the lessons. That comes from joy, not misery – and it causes joy too, if we let it.

“Sometimes I think you have to march right in and demand your rights, even if
you don’t know what your rights are, or who the person is you’re talking to.
Then, on the way out, slam the door.” – Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

First, I just absolutely love that quote. There’s a certain kind of humor that also has a sort of faux inspirational quality to it, and that style of humor tickles my funny bone enormously.

But it also represents what I feel is a helpful – and underutilized – emotional state. I call it “generic indignation,” and for me it’s often the motivating energy I need.

What’s this all about? Well, to begin with you have to understand that I’m very, very nice to people. I like people! And I think that most people are trying really hard and aren’t really the source of any accidental misery they deliver to you. The perfect example is when you see an irate customer screaming at some poor cashier because the price of butter went up by twenty cents or something. Look, even if that cashier somehow were solely responsible for the price of butter, they didn’t increase it just to mess with you, specifically. So screaming at them makes you an awful person, if you do it.

Most people, even the screamers, actually realize that most of the time. So why do they do it? Because the rage against slights, the righteous indignation, it feels good. It’s energizing. It’s exhilarating! It fills you with a clarity of purpose and the fuel for the fire of its birthing crucible. Its a wonderful feeling and actually quite helpful, except most people completely squander it by aiming it at some poor innocent soul and being a huge jerk about it, and then letting it burn out that way.

Here’s what I do instead:

First, I never let actual people bother me like that. Like I said earlier, they’re not your enemies. They’re not trying to disrupt you. No conspiracy exists just to make Johnny’s life challenging. So I’m never aiming any real ire at people who exist.

Instead, I invent a fictional “They.” A totally ludicrous and equally nebulous group of adversaries that do everything from throw sharp rocks under my bare feet at the beach to controlling the weather to ruin my camping weekends. “They” infect me with the flu specifically to hinder my project and “they” sabotaged my kitchen sink so it would leak.

But let me tell you something – I’ll show them! They think they can stop ME? Johnny Roccia!? Not on your life, pal! I’ll get the last laugh, even if I have to fix a kitchen sink with the flu and go camping in the pouring rain to do it.

That’s right – just because there’s no one to actually absorb the ire doesn’t mean I can’t summon it up. I can put a determined scowl on my face and go work out just to spite “them,” even when nothing else in the world would motivate me.

It’s fun. All the enjoyment of sneering, spitting fury without any of the guilt associated with actually being a jerk to someone, nor any of the regret of foolishness for blaming someone blameless for your problems. The fact that the “them” I summon are so ludicrous means I never come close to accidentally blaming an actual person or group. I might as well be mad at leprechauns. But I get to be mad all the same!

Try it out. The next time some random life event gets in your way and you wish there were someone to blame – blame “them!” And then show them what you’re made of! Prove they can’t stop you! Give ’em hell!

And then, slam the door!

Recently I had a discussion with someone about parenting styles, and her description of mine was “hands-free.”

Though I understand the description, I actually don’t agree with its core. I’m not hands-free at all! I’m incredibly involved in my kids’ lives, both in the macro sense and in the day-to-day. My hands are very much on.

But my hands are holding theirs, not leashes. My hands are guiding, not stopping. They’re lifting, not pulling.

Let’s give an example. There are some parents who choose every meal – heck, every morsel – for their children. The parent chooses the meals, the snacks, etc., and the kids have zero input. They eat what they’re told to eat and they’re punished if they don’t. Compliance is mandatory. Truthfully, I think that’s a bad method.

But I also think the opposite is bad! The opposite might be called “hands-free,” and involves basically having no input as the parent into the diets of the kids. I see this more frequently than I wish were true: any demand from a kid for any food item (even things that only barely qualify as “food”) being given to the kid instantly and without discussion. Sugar by the bucket, snacks without a hint of nutritional value, no attention paid to scheduling, etc. They might stop their kids from eating literal rat poison, but that seems to be the limit.

My method is neither of those. My method involves neither utterly removing kids’ input from the equation nor yielding my own input from it. Instead, my method involves guided conversation.

I say this with absolute sincerity: all three of my children counted protein and vitamins in the first hundred words they could say. They knew what healthy food was. As they got older, they knew why healthy food was important. Why balanced meals and moderated sweets led to healthier lives and better moods. They know the costs of unhealthy foods – and that means the true costs, not fear-mongered ones. They know that a piece of candy isn’t going to make them sick. They know that two bowls of ice cream will.

My oldest is ten. She has her own money, she goes to the store by herself. She can buy food – even food I don’t want her to! – if she wants. I have no interest in the level of control it would take to make sure she never buys a Coke; the harm a soda inflicts pales in comparison to the level of damage done by that much helicoptering. Instead, by the time she had her own money and knew the way to the store by herself, I trusted that she knew enough about her own health and body (and enough about the value of money – kids may race to spend “free” money on junk, but they’re surprisingly more intelligent about the money they had to sweat to earn) to make good overall health choices.

One time she did come home with a Coke. I asked her about it, and she said she wanted to try it. (Note that she felt no need to hide this from me – she rightly understood that she wouldn’t face any sort of “punishment” for this choice, and as such was completely open with me.) She took two sips and put it in the fridge.

It was still there, untouched further, a week later. She said she hadn’t cared for it.

No, I’m not hands-free. In fact, I probably spend more time parenting, both overall and on any given moment, than the vast majority of other parents. I just spend that time with a different aim – my goal isn’t to minimize my own inconvenience, which sadly seems to be the primary motivating factor of a lot of parents out there. My goal is to train competent humans. Humans who can do things, figure things out, and succeed at things. My goal is to make their hands strong, capable, and free.

Today I attended a TEDx Talk live. Six speakers gave their insights on a variety of topics, and unlike every other TEDx Talk I’ve ever watched, I got to be present in the room instead of watching it on YouTube.

It was wonderful. These sorts of events – pure speaking for the sake of idea transfer – give me incredible joy.

Listening to people talk about their thing, from their perspective, without any specific prompting or input from me creates an amazing space for my brain. It’s pure reception without navigation. Interest without agenda. This unfiltered flow of new viewpoints catalyzes new ideas at an incredible pace for me.

I encourage it! Watch documentaries almost at random. Pull books off the shelf without much concern for topic. The key isn’t the information you receive. It’s the ideas you generate as a result of your brain firing on all cylinders. Which it definitely doesn’t if it’s just processing familiar information into the same old buckets. So go out and find information so new to you that you don’t even have a bucket for it yet. That bucket will end up filling with gold.

Don’t try too hard to impose one. There is virtue in accepting the inputs for what they are. You can control the outputs anyway.

Remember “connect the dots?” There would be a page full of dots, and if you connected them with a continual line in the order listed, a picture would appear.

Life is like that, except for two major differences. The first is that you’re constantly making the picture yourself, by connecting each new dot to the next one you want. You meet a new co-worker that you like (dot), so you go get some dinner with them at a restaurant they like (dot), so you discover that the restaurant does a trivia night (dot), so you go to that and meet your new significant other (dot), and on and on and on. You keep making the life you want by connecting things in the order that you want.

The other way life is different is that occasionally, very unexpectedly, a totally new dot just appears in your life. Sure, everything is connected in some way, but some things definitely have only the most tenuous of threads tying them together.

Here’s the thing about those new dots, those totally unexpected events – they’re seeds. Seeds of new pictures, new adventures, new paths to even more dots. Or, you know, they could be nothing.

In order for them to be anything at all, you have to take the dot for what it is, and be willing to draw lines. Life is made of these lines – don’t leave them!

Beneath the way you act, the way you think, and even the way you interpret sensory signals are a set of core beliefs that are so deep you probably don’t even realize you have them.

You may have gained them when you were very young. They may have been imparted by important people in your life, such as your parents. They may have come from pivotal events in your formative years. But once you gain them, they almost never change. They’re the bedrock of the rest of you.

That makes them absolutely worth examining.

We are evolved creatures, and much of what we do comes from past experiences. But I don’t want to yield quote that much control over my destiny to a version of me that didn’t know what I know now. I want to be able to take my current knowledge and use it to adjust my core beliefs if doing so will be beneficial. In order to even make that judgment, I have to really be prepared to look at my core beliefs for what they are and accept that no matter what they are, there’s some possibility they’re not as accurate or helpful as they could be.

How would you act if one of you rejected one of your most deeply-held beliefs and replaced it with its opposite? Would your life improve? Would you improve the world?

I don’t think all beliefs are equal. I think some values, views, and convictions are better, and do more for the good of the world. I seek more of those, and I seek to reject those that don’t meet that standard. I would be foolish to claim that I’d already discovered all the truth there was.