As a general rule, you should look for self-sustaining virtuous systems in your life. That’s a fancy way of saying that you should look for relationships, whether with people or activities, that give you back what you put in.

One way of looking at this is the way my father often looked at hobbies. Whenever he had a hobby, he liked to find a way to make just a little bit of money off of it. Not enough to turn it into a job, but just enough to fund the money that people typically put into hobbies. In this way, the hobby “paid for itself” indefinitely. So when my father first started really getting into photography, he also started shooting weddings and events a little on the side – enough to pay for the new toys he wanted.

Another way of looking at this is to make sure that the things you’re putting your heart into are also filling up your heart. Giving 100% of yourself to something is a wonderful way to care about it, an expression of love. You can do that if you also get 100% back. You can do it forever. But if you put more in than you get back, eventually you’re just feeding leeches for the sake of feeding leeches. Some people will be a part of the self-sustaining virtuous system, and you should give them your whole heart. Other people are leeches, and you should pull them off of you and cast them away.

All this is to say – love what loves you back.

In order to be terrible at something, you’d have to actually try.

Most of the things you do every day are things that (by now) you’re effortlessly decent at. If you drive a car, you’re probably not crashing into things every day by now. Whatever your job is, you probably perform it at least competently. Any hobbies you have, you’ve likely held onto because you’ve enjoyed the process of gaining some skill at them.

So if I told you that today’s challenge was to go be really, really bad at something, you’d have to put some real effort in. You’d basically have two options:

1. Take something you already do and deliberately do it poorly. Since you already do most of your normal things competently, it would take a decent amount of effort, concentration and strategy to do it really really badly.
2. Find a new thing you don’t already do well and just do it. You’ll probably be terrible because you’ve never done it before.

Well look, don’t do the first one. Don’t crash your car or tank your job. But that second one – that’s great! If you set out to go be terrible at something, then you’ll pick up a new thing and you’ll have succeeded at your goal. Which is better than what happens to most people: they set a daily goal of “Don’t Be Terrible At Anything” and they succeed… by never doing anything new.

If you plant two trees, they will diverge in their growth almost immediately. The same species of tree, watered the same way, planted in the same soil, will still diverge. This is not a failing of the trees nor their environment; this is simply the nature of growth.

All growth comes from discomfort. All discomfort is unique. Therefore, all growth must be your own. As you become more of who you are, you do it alone.

It’s fascinating to me how the surrounding context can change the meaning of a piece of information. Even context added well after the initial information was transmitted.

This is why it’s worthwhile to take note of the world around you, to be observant even in your day-to-day minutiae. It may not seem relevant at the time, but a future context could make that information very valuable.

Practicing a certain level of “observational discipline,” whether in the form of note-taking, daily reflection, or even just sharing the details of your day in conversation can help make the future make more sense when you get there.

My oldest daughter just brought home her report card. It was straight A’s, along with a note: “work habits need developing.”

Um… do they?

Generally speaking, I don’t think “straight A’s” is a laudable goal. Since the actual impact on your life is exactly the same if you sprinkle in a few B’s or even a C here and there, if you worked hard enough to get straight A’s you probably wasted a good bit of effort on overkill.

That is, unless you managed to get those grades without having to work very hard. In that case, I think your work habits are pretty much exactly correct for the task, don’t you?

There are all sorts of problems with the scenario, of course. If she’s getting straight A’s while visibly slacking off, then clearly she needs more challenge. And in the real world, she could seek it – it’s only in the strangely arbitrary world of grade school that people feel the need to control your work habits without actually matching them to an appropriate task.

You see, I know my daughter. She’s an incredibly hard (and diligent, and intelligent) worker when those are the things required for success. Watch her painting, practicing karate, or selling Girl Scout cookies and you’ll see a very disciplined and fastidious person. But she’s also savvy – savvy enough to recognize that a “work habits need developing” note on her report card counts for exactly nothing and can be safely ignored.

The idea that she should practice better work habits so that she can be prepared for some potential future challenge is ludicrous. That’s not how it works. You have to give her the challenge now, and everything it takes to beat that challenge will manifest as she faces it. So it’s time to up her challenge level, not keep her in the kiddie pool but have her pretend to swim.

Imagine that you had a vehicle, and you didn’t know what kind of fuel it took. So every day you use the vehicle, and then you just guess what you have to put in the tank. Gasoline? Biofuels? Diesel? Electricity? You have no idea. In order to even keep the vehicle moving at all, maybe you just throw a little bit of everything in there and hope for the best. Even if the vehicle limps along, you’re certainly getting nowhere near maximum efficiency. And you’re probably damaging it.

Lots of vehicles actually work like this – did you know you can put vegetable oil in a diesel engine and it’ll run? It’ll also, you know… really destroy the engine over time, but it’ll run.

Do you know what else works like this?

You.

You do a lot of work! All day, every day you’re doing stuff. But that engine needs fuel, my friend. And I don’t just mean food and water and sleep. I mean you need to get something back to make it all worth it. You need joy. Something to fill up your tank. Now answer honestly: do you know what your perfect fuel mix is?

Most people don’t. Most people are behaving like that top example; they’re throwing a mix of random stuff and hope into the tank. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, they don’t know which is which, and they move along.

You deserve more. You can have more! You just need a little tracking. Get some paper, and every day write down what your first happy thought was that day. Write down your last happy thought before you went to bed. Write down the thing you looked forward to when you were waiting for something unpleasant to end. Write it all down.

In a month, look at all your answers. Pattens will emerge. You’ll have looked forward to the same things multiple times. The same happy thought would be what you woke to more than once. Once you have an idea of what those things are, you can deliberately seek more of them.

And maybe certain things you thought energized you… won’t. Maybe you’ll look back at a month’s writing and realize that “television” or “alcohol” never appear on your list. If they aren’t filling your tank… why are you doing them?

Questions should point towards solutions. When you question something, you should have a hypothesis – a theory that the questions are meant to test. A point you’re trying to reach.

Questions for the sake of curiosity are fine, of course. But also remember that the time of others is a limited resource, carefully given. When you use your own time, feel free to indulge in boundless intellectual investigation for its own sake – that’s how the world is discovered! (And to my children: your dad always counts – his time is always freely given to the insatiable curiosity your beautiful minds possess.) But when engaging with others, your inquiry should be leading somewhere. To a proposed solution, an engagement of some kind. If you aren’t, then you aren’t making the best use of your – or their – time.

I’ve seen this question float around from time to time: “If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who would it be?”

It’s a good question, definitely would spur a decent conversation. Good icebreaker if you’re ever getting to know someone. But you know what never gets asked?

Where would you go to eat?

There’s a good reason that doesn’t get asked – it doesn’t matter at all. If you suddenly had the opportunity to eat dinner with Ralph Waldo Emerson or Frederick Douglass or some other amazing individual, who cares where you’re eating? If the person you’d pick suggested a restaurant you dislike, would you turn them down? Of course not.

The point is that our connections to the people around us, the people we choose to connect with, are paramount. All emotion – love, hate, grief, joy – all of it stems from connection. If you’re closed off to someone or something, that thing has no ability to inspire any great feeling in you. In order for something to affect you, you must first choose to allow it a connection with you. For good or ill, that connection is very difficult to moderate; you can’t give something the power to cause you joy without also allowing it the power to cause you sorrow.

And so with people, who you choose to give that power to is of vital importance. People will affect you, they will inspire you, they will complement you, and they will support you. The right people in your life will make all the difference.

So when you’re making a decision, look for the people that decision affects, and which of those people will become closer or farther away from you as a result. Choosing jobs? Look at who you’d work with, not what you’d do. Choosing schools? Look at who teaches, not what the major is. Choosing cities? Look at your potential neighbors and value them more than you think you should.

Be a people person.

Doubt is a terrible burden. It plagues us and haunts us. It makes us inefficient; it keeps us from putting all of our juice where it will do the most good for us. It makes us waste precious time second-guessing ourselves.

And yet, we often spend a lot of our efforts protecting that doubt. We don’t ask for a promotion, because what if they say no? We don’t try that project, because what if we fail?

The promotion, the successful project, the whatever – those are secondary goals. The primary goal is the removal of doubt. That is a precious gift! If you have doubt about whether a friend would support you in a particular circumstance, don’t avoid that circumstance! This is important information to you, so go find out!

Either you were wrong to doubt the friend and that’s great, or you were correct to doubt them and now you never have to waste effort there again. These are both valuable things to know. The removal of doubt is a great blessing, in either direction.

Today marks the first month since my father’s passing. I wish I could say that it’s gotten easier to endure, but I try not to lie to you.

No memory exists in a vacuum, unaffected by others. The things you do in life affect the perception of others. Good and bad deeds aren’t taken in perfect isolation. Gandhi did some bad things and Hitler did some good ones, but how those things affect the overall legacy is a tapestry we cannot see the threads of from far away. We can only look at the whole of the woven pattern.

What will our legacy be? The shadow of my father’s passes over everything I do, see, touch. It gives me pause to think about the future.