You can overshoot or undershoot. You can do too much and you can do too little. Most of the time, you’re doing great either way!

We’ve all cooked too much food at some point. It’s not a waste; a little Tupperware and suddenly “mistakenly making too much food” turns into “intelligently preparing meals for the next few days.” Most effort rolls over. Wrote too many words? Put half of them into a new project.

Or maybe you undershot a little. You meant to build a bridge, but you built half a bridge. Half a bridge, by itself, isn’t much more useful than no bridge at all – but someone else out there is probably in possession of half a bridge, too. In fact, I guarantee it. Not only can you combine efforts, but the very act of doing so builds something even more valuable than the bridge itself – it builds somewhere for it to go. Now you have a new friend!

The point is, don’t get too hung up on “the right amount” of a good thing. Your life isn’t really discrete like that. You’ll be cooking and writing and building your whole life, a continual stream of pasta and pages and bridges. You can always chop it all up into the correct portions later. For now, just do the things you love and let them flow. They’ll connect when they’re meant to.

Today’s post takes the long way around to get to you – I wrote this a few weeks ago and it was picked up by a marvelous organization who shared it on their own blog. (But since I wrote it, it’s totally not a cop-out to use it for today’s post!)

I’ll share the post and also promote the org by linking it here. Go have a read!

People are imperfect. But “imperfect” doesn’t mean “bad.” Far from it!

That’s a vital thing to remember because people are going to let you down your whole life. You’re going to have certain expectations in your times of trouble and need, and people – good people – have no way of reading your mind. You might not even have a good way of reading your own mind, in the sense that many of your expectations will be subconscious ones.

For instance, you may reach out to a loved one because you’re having a bad day, and your expectation is “I will feel better.” And then you do reach out, but you don’t feel better after. You don’t consciously know what you wanted them to do or say – if you did, you probably wouldn’t have needed to reach out. But they tried. Whatever they did, it was their way of helping.

Just love people for that. The world is full of imperfect people trying so very hard to help you. They will fail, time and again. Love them anyway.

A little over twenty years ago, I met two of my closest friends. We met as part of a shared geeky gaming club, and we’ve been together ever since. We’ve all grown up, we all have children.

Today, I took each of our oldest kids and played those same games with them. It was amazing – my childhood and adolescence reignited. They had a blast. They probably didn’t have half as much fun as I did, though.

My father had many hobbies. He never tried to force them on me, but he was always open about them – and if I showed the slightest bit of interest, he poured as much fuel onto that fire as he could. The result was that I shared many interests with him, gaining great bonds together, but I also learned how to pick what I liked. How to become interested in things because I wanted to be.

That’s what I wanted to do with my own kids (and the kids of my dear friends, who I love as my own). My kids share several of my interests, but they also have a bunch of their own.

The torch doesn’t stay the same when you pass it. It changes shape and color, as it should be. I am thrilled beyond measure to simply bask in its light as someone else carries it.

Lots of changes to your timeline would be bad. You’ve heard this concept before, maybe – about how if you weren’t three minutes late for that appointment, maybe you would have been hit by a bus instead. Of course, maybe you get hit by a bus because you’re three minutes late…

But in the larger scope of things, changes to when stuff happens in your life have rippling effects that you can’t possibly visualize. Your life wouldn’t be exactly the same if you’d gotten that new job six months earlier or later. Things are too interconnected for that.

So try not to pick a single moment in time and lament it. Your life wouldn’t contain all the good stuff it contains now but none of the bad stuff if only you hadn’t missed that one phone call or botched that one date. It would be different in many ways, better and worse, because time works like that.

You are who you are, and this is where you are. Build from here. The right place is right here, after all, and the right time is now.

Everything you have ever wanted is locked behind an unbreakable door. The unbreakable door has, however, a very simple lock. It is unlocked simply by doing things you don’t want to do.

That’s it! The healthy physical form of your dream? It’s locked behind a door that is opened by diet and exercise. The date you want? It’s locked behind a door that is opened by going up to the person and asking them out. The dream job? Behind a door unlocked by hard work. The wealth? Behind a door unlocked by financial responsibility.

Here’s the thing – you probably can’t max out every value in your life. But If you’re not going to unlock the door, stop pining for what it hides. The door is unbreakable, but it isn’t mysterious. The second you say “I don’t want to do that,” you’re just saying “I don’t want what’s behind that door.” You don’t have to want everything! I don’t judge anyone for what they want or don’t want.

But I’ll judge – rightly – anyone who sits in front of the “Health” door drinking gallons of soda pop and eating candy bars while complaining that the door is locked.

Hey my friend, had a rough day? Let’s sit and you can tell me about it. Of course, you don’t have to. We could just sit outside and smoke a cigar together. We could listen to a little music – or play some. We could do something else entirely. Something to eat? Or hey, drink some water. No, don’t get up – I’ll get it for you. That’s what friends are for.

Then let’s just talk a while. If the conversation goes to that, I’m all for it. If you just need a little reminder that there’s someone to listen, I’m glad to have done it. Maybe it’ll be more; maybe you’ll want some real advice, or even a hand with something. Maybe it’ll be something big. Don’t worry if it is. It could be a glass of water or helping you move across the country, I’m here either way. That’s what friends are for.

Of course, it might not come to that. It might not come to anything. We all have rough days. They’re like snowflakes – no two are exactly alike. Enough of them will bury you. But while they’re falling, a few extra hands will keep your pathway through them clear. You’ve got at least one extra pair of hands right here any time you need them.

That’s what friends are for.

The matron of the farm stood before about thirty assembled farmhands. Today was a day of choring, and there was a lot to do. Many tasks were spread around the hundred or so acres of land, each one taking different numbers of hands, different amounts of time, different tools, different instructions. Only the matron knew them all, and coordinating thirty people would mean a lot of lost time; the first three might finish baling the hay, but for lack of knowledge about what to do next, could be idle for an hour as the matron was making her rounds directing everyone else. That would be a lot of wasted manhours, which the matron wanted to avoid.

So, the first instruction she gave was to point to the wood pile: “There’s a mountain of logs over there that we’d never run out of, even if we all chopped all day and nothing else. So any time you finish a task, you come back here and start chopping and stacking wood. You just do that until I come find you and tell you to do something else.”

This way, the hands would never be idle; there would always be something to do, and the matron would never have to go find anyone. After starting each new task, she’d just come back to the wood pile and find hands a-chopping, and then she’d take who she needed off to the next task.

For any given “ongoing” project, something you wish to invest in over time, there will be several large, specific tasks. At certain milestones, there will be big things to do, but there will also be plenty of time when there’s nothing from the list that can be done right now because tasks are often time-dependent or need other things to be done or a whole host of other reasons.

So, for projects like that, you need a “chop wood” action. Something you can always do, that’s always productive, and takes any amount of time. Whether you have a spare 15 minutes or four hours, you can fill that time with this task without needing anything else to be done and get progress towards your goal.

It is absolutely worth spending the time at the beginning of a project to settle on a good “chop wood” process, even if it takes a little time to figure out or some front-loaded costs to make sure you can always do it. It will make your time on task that much more efficient, which will in turn motivate you more as you always see real progress. Momentum matters, so if you can’t think of anything else to do, chop wood.

Criticize lightly, praise extensively.

When someone says that someone else “made a big deal” out of something, remember that they mean relatively. People measure your reactions against your median reaction.

Make it a habit to react to good things with more enthusiasm than you do bad things. When you must criticize, be direct and to the point. When you praise – and praise often! – do so with great fanfare. This applies even – especially! – to criticisms or praise aimed at yourself.

This not only makes your criticisms taken more seriously (because no one will think you’re “overreacting” if it’s less reaction than normal for you), but it also keeps your life and your relationships centered around the good, not the bad.

That’s not just a big deal – it’s a great deal.