One of my all-time favorite quotes, one that I feel contains so much wisdom that it alone will probably prevent 95% of the problems you’ll face in life if you absorb in its fullness, is from Maya Angelou:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

There is a way to navigate life that can seem strange, but I believe in it fully. The technique involves understanding that you, yes you, are fundamentally different from every other human on Earth in a very important way. You live your life in first person. You have control over, and moral responsibility for, your own actions. You cannot control or own anyone else’s. That means you aren’t the same – from your perspective.

That’s the important part: perspective. See, far too many people seem to view the world as if they were in third person. As if they were observing every person from outside the system. When you look at the world that way, you think that moral rules should apply to everyone, including yourself, equally.

I don’t view the world like that at all. I hold myself to incredibly different (and to be clear, higher) standards than I would ever expect from others. Because expectations are only rational when you can influence the outcome. I can control my own actions; I can improve them, adjust them in the future if a current course of action yields bad results. I cannot make that happen in others, so I hold no expectations about others’ behavior. I sometimes try to predict it, but I never count on it.

So, a little geeky tangent: in a lot of video games where you interact with a variety of characters, there’s a term “NPC.” That acronym stands for “non-player character,” and it’s the term for every character that exists only as code in the game; characters not controlled by a “player,” i.e. you. NPCs have pre-coded behaviors that are bound by the rules and script of the game. They cannot deviate from those behaviors, obviously. If a security guard is programmed to attack you if you try to rob the bank, the guard will do that even if you try to give him a million dollars not to, because the game’s code and the character’s script have no ability to deviate from the pre-written actions.

From your point of view, you should think of every other person on Earth as an NPC. In reality, every person is a rich, complex, moral actor with agency and ethical responsibility. But all of those terms describe your relationship with yourself, which means that from your perspective, only you are those things. Everyone else is a pre-programmed robot who will never change, never do anything different. And they certainly won’t change in the way you want, because you want them to! Expecting otherwise is putting your life in the hands of the scorpion.

The old adage of “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” is incredibly accurate. You do not want to hear this, but if someone ever lets you down in the same way twice, it is 100% your fault. If you ask a friend to cook dinner and they produce an inedible, toxic mess – well, chalk it up to experience, thank them for the effort, and go out for pizza. But if you ask them again – that’s on you. That doesn’t mean you should never forgive or give second chances, but it does mean that the results are wholly owned by you, and you can’t be mad at them if it’s gross, and you should have a backup plan to order pizza. It definitely means you shouldn’t ask that friend to cook if you’re in a bind and will have no means of getting a backup meal. It means forgive… with a safety net.

This also – and pretty please, read this next part deeply, because it’s very important – this also doesn’t mean that other people aren’t important. It doesn’t mean you can discount them, dismiss them, devalue them. People are wonderful. It just means that trying to navigate life as if everyone will take everything you don’t like and deeply internalize it in order to make drastic changes that result in a better outcome for you specifically in the future is… well, fool me once. People are their own people. They live their own lives. Huge, dramatic shifts in the core ethical foundation and daily behaviors of a person are rarer than blue moons. Love people for who they are, but don’t expect them to be anything else.

Something doesn’t have to be fun for you to have fun. Fun is something you can just pluck out of the air, any time you want. You don’t even have to be in a good mood! Fun isn’t a byproduct of mood. Fun isn’t a mood, itself.

It’s not an activity, it’s not a mood. Fun is a way of treating the world.

Fun is a magic ingredient that simultaneously makes the good things in the world better while demoting the bad things to a status of lesser importance.

Fun is an assertion of independence. Of control over your destiny. No matter what the world throws at you, it cannot stop you from having fun.

My father was sick with diabetes for many years before his passing. Diabetes often comes with amputations, and my father was no exception. When he lost his first toe, he took a picture of his foot post-operation and sent it to me. Along with the caption: “This little piggy went to market.“

Fun makes you invincible. If you’re spending time with loved ones, fun will spice those memories and then encase them in amber, making them forever a part of you. If you’re mourning together, then fun lets you say to the world “you can take everything but this.”

Never this.

Have fun.

There’s a difference between exploration and research. Research comes with a lens; an interpretation, a purpose. Before you even realize it, you’re filtering everything you find though the purpose for which you set out.

If you go out looking for gold, you may find gold. But you’ll miss a lot of really, really awesome stuff that doesn’t obviously get you closer to gold when you first see it. But if you explore – if you just set out, not to find gold specifically, but to see what’s out there to find – you discover magic.

You might be slightly less likely to find gold. But you’re far more likely to find a whole host of other amazing things. And especially if you’re not even sure if gold is what you want yet, that’s a much better proposition.

Don’t always look for something. Often, just look.

I love that word, and I realize we don’t have a good version of it for our post-academic adult life. We don’t have a good word for it as adults because we mostly abandon the concept as adults, and that’s a shame!

When we’re in school, we have these three spheres: your required academics (the direct schooling you’re pretty much forced to do), your personal life, and then extracurriculars – stuff you choose to do (or not to) and have a lot of control over but which still relates to your continued educational and academic pursuits.

Then, we become adults and get jobs, and most of us just abandon that idea. We have our “main job,” and then we have our personal lives. Most people don’t do a lot of stuff that relates to their “continued career pursuits” but isn’t something they’re directly getting paid for as a job itself. This is tragic!

No, I don’t think our entire lives should revolve around work, and I don’t think that we need to turn everything we do into a way to make money. But I think we often draw too bright a line between “work” and “personal” spaces as if work was something that needed to be quarantined lest it infect our personal lives and ruin them. My work is more rewarding if I’m more invested in it, more in control of it. My personal life is more rewarding if it’s more than just the space between workdays, using that time to escape something I dread.

Hence, extracurriculars. I have plenty of personal hobbies that have nothing to do with work, but I also set aside space for career-related things that I don’t have to do. No one makes me post on LinkedIn or write guest articles for business-related publications or chat with people outside of my own organization. It’s not pure relaxation, either – it’s not a board game night or a park outing with my kids. It’s a middle ground that enhances both.

Take a few hours away from your main job each month – you’ll never miss them. Use those hours to add a few extracurriculars to your schedule. Talk to some people that are neither clients nor co-workers (or even prospective members of either group). Go attend an event or conference because you want to and find the topic interesting. Log into a webinar that you think looks neat. Then talk about it with someone. This is a simple concept, but sometimes hard to execute. I promise you, it’s more than possible – the only thing stopping you is personal inertia. Once you get this ball rolling though, both your career and your personal life become vastly more rewarding.

When you get stuck trying to answer a question, the problem can sometimes be that the question you’re asking is too small. For instance, imagine trying to answer this question in a vacuum: “How many bus stops should there be on this route?”

That may be a very difficult question! To answer it, you need the answers to bigger questions. Where is this bus going? How often? What’s the purpose of this particular bus? Questions like that are needed before the smaller ones.

When we manage projects or organizations, sometimes we get caught up in the smaller questions too early. People argue because they don’t share the same big vision about what’s going on. A shuttle from the airport to a cluster of hotels nearby needs fewer stops than a trolley through a downtown shopping district.

How to best organize a quarterly stakeholder meeting? Well – why are you even having it? What problems are you solving that are helped by this meeting? Those bigger questions will naturally solve a lot of the smaller ones. But you can’t create a vision out of the small details, any more than you could plan an effective bus route by starting with the question of how much the fare should be.

The world is full of terrible things that aren’t anybody’s fault. Our nature is such, however, that we try to find the “villain behind it all” every time we look at something inconvenient.

Take traffic, for example. I dislike traffic, and you probably do too. If you’re sitting in traffic, late and hot and frustrated, it can be ever so tempting to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of a very small and specific group. We usually pick a distant, shadowy and nebulous group like “car company executives” and decide that it’s actually their fault that we’re stuck in traffic!

“Those fat cats WANT us to be stuck in traffic! That way we burn more gas and put more strain on our cars, which lines their pockets! Meanwhile, they don’t even drive, they just fly around in helicopters!”

It really is tempting to believe that. When the world has villains, the world makes sense. We can say “if only someone took them down a peg…”

But that’s not the way it is. Traffic is an emergent system, like almost all bad systems. No one designed it or created it, certainly not with the intent of harming millions of people, mwa ha ha. No, traffic just exists because lots and lots of individuals, all on their own, want to go to roughly the same places at roughly the same time. Sorry.

Pick any society-wide problem and there probably isn’t a shadowy cartel behind it. The media is negative, hollow, and agenda-driven. But no one is controlling it; it’s like that because that’s what individuals want to consume. Ask people if they want their entire media network to be nothing but screaming partisans, and they say “no!” But watch what they click on, and it’s screaming partisans every time. There’s no cigar-smoke-filled room with a handful of old men deciding that this is the way it should be. Instead, there are thousands of nine-to-five workers at radio stations and newspapers across the country who go where their audience wants them to.

It’s the same all over. Politics is full of lying snakes because being a lying snake is how you succeed in that world, not because there are elite gatekeepers forcing the noble heroes out. Hollywood is full of reboots because people pay to see reboots. And traffic is just bad.

What this means for you is that there’s no simple fix; there’s probably no fix at all. You can’t fix politics, the media, or traffic by finding the hidden bad guy and overthrowing him. There’s no single kingpin of crime.

When you see a bad system, you just have to decide to be aware of it, and insulate yourself. I would love it if most media was informative, educational, and nuanced – but I would also love it if I could snap my fingers and summon gold bars. Both of those things are about equally likely to happen, so I don’t waste any time wishing for it. Instead, I just opt out. No one forces me to listen to the horrors of the six o’clock news, and no one forces you, either. I don’t even drive to work.

You don’t have to. Build the life you want away from the systems you despise. There’s no villain but your darker impulses dragging you back, and that’s a villain you can defeat.

Rewards are amazing. The returns from action, the benefits of effort. Attaching the right reward to something turns “you have to” into “you get to.”

My kids are already well-behaved; if I say “time to clean up” then I get a chorus of “okay Daddy” followed by a flurry of activity. But as my children reach a certain age (5 in my household, though that’s totally arbitrary), I begin to award money for certain kinds of chores. The money can then be spent on various trinkets and goodies at local stores without my input.

The kids already happily do the chores assigned, but once they cross this threshold, they start asking me – frequently – what chores they can do.

We can’t summon our desires from thin air. All reward takes a combination of effort and the right opportunity to make that effort. So every time such an opportunity presents itself, rejoice – you get to!

I don’t want to get punched in the face. But if I have to, then I’d rather be punched in the face and get a dollar than get punched in the face for free.

The point is, slightly better is still objectively better. Sometimes you can’t avoid a disaster. But “disaster + cup of hot chocolate” is objectively better than just “disaster.” So make yourself the cup of hot chocolate.

If nothing else, it reminds you that you have agency, even if only at the margins. It lets you know that there are corners of life, however tiny and fleeting, that are beautiful and wondrous. You can live in those moments even if everything else burns down around you.

Those moments aren’t an escape or a crutch – if you can act to avoid the big disasters, do so. But if the bombs ever truly start dropping and there’s nothing else to be done, I’d rather put on my favorite music and goof around with my kids than spend the last few minutes screaming “woe is me.”

You can make anything – for you, for others, for everyone – slightly better. Do it every day.

Don’t ever think about stuff.

Wait, let me make that a little less deliberately provocative: you should rarely just think about stuff.

“Thinking” is realistically one of two things: planning, or daydreaming. There’s nothing wrong with a little daydreaming if that’s what you need right now, but way too many people imagine that they’re planning when really, they’re daydreaming.

What’s the difference? Whether the thinking produces any forward motion. You can think about stuff all day without ever reaching any new conclusions, putting any plans into action, or even making any plans to begin with. When people say “let me think about that,” they typically aren’t about to approach “that” in a systematic way that will produce any results.

How do you avoid this trap? Think onto paper. Don’t just think; write.

Writing produces something tangible. It shows your thoughts to you. It allows you to show your thoughts to others. It exposes their flaws and sharpens their good edges. And writing is the beginning of actually planning. If you think onto paper and then decide to take action, you’re already halfway there. And if you decide not to take action, you’ll know why.

I write every day because I think every day. You think every day, too! I just commit to not keeping my thoughts in my own head where they aren’t doing any good. You don’t have to do that every day – but you should do it more.

I strongly dislike the word “offensive.” I also dislike the concept that it tends to represent in modern discourse.

I don’t like it because I think it focuses entirely on the wrong thing. There are many things, entire categories of things, that you shouldn’t say or write – not because they’re offensive, but because they’re cruel. You shouldn’t say these things, even if you wouldn’t offend anyone by saying them. Even if you’re in company that would like you to say them. You shouldn’t say cruel things without great justification, because you are an honorable person.

Other things need to be said. They may be unpleasant to hear for someone who is hiding from a painful truth, but that person may be someone you’re sworn to help – a loved one, a trusted friend, or someone else who needs you. There are things that you may need to say to them that are true, and just, and helpful – but which will offend them. Which may offend others who overhear. This shouldn’t stop you.

If you take care to never be cruel, to always be just, to never speak just to hear the sound of your own voice, and to always speak when your words can be helpful – then you will not need to care about offending.