A lot of being successful in life comes down to figuring out the right time horizon for each repeating task in your life.

Think about things like laundry or email. It’s certainly not the most efficient approach to answer each email the second it comes in regardless of what else you’re doing, just as it’s silly to wash each article of clothing as soon as it comes off your body. We batch these things for a reason. On the other hand, it’s very easy for a slight disruption in schedule to turn “an appropriate-sized batch” into “an insurmountable heap of bullshit.”

Everything batches differently. Words like “weekly” are nice, convenient ideas – but they aren’t always the correct cadence for whatever you have to do. It would be wonderful if every task reached “peak heap” in seven days, but that’s not how it works.

So, what cadence do you choose? How do you keep it straight? If you’re not doing it on a regular schedule, then you’re using at least some of your mental effort to monitor levels waiting for the right threshold to be hit, and I don’t really want to do that, either.

My personal solution: a “middle heap.”

For any task that should get completely done at regular intervals, I create miniature versions in between. For instance, I like to completely clear my inbox every week. Doing it every day would be absurd, but only doing it once a week creates the aforementioned “insurmountable heap of bullshit” every Friday. So instead, I have a daily routine that does not involve committing to “inbox zero,” but involves responding to a set number of emails. This, in turn, builds in a “monitoring event” so I can gauge the state of things without compulsively checking.

Sometimes you look at a huge task and you don’t start it because you feel like “starting” automatically equates to “committing to finishing right now, all in one go.” But that doesn’t have to be the case! A lot of laundry has piled up? Okay, just wash one load of it. That doesn’t have to be a solemn resolution to “handle the laundry once and for all.” And it’s better than nothing.

Everything is a game. Everything. You can play games for fun and you can play games for prizes, and often you’ll do both. But everything is a game.

Running for political office is a game. Attending a fancy dinner party is a game. Navigating modern life, having a job, driving. These are all games.

You need to understand that everything is a game in order to understand how rules work. You need to understand how rules work in order to live a life of intention, instead of wandering around with no clue what’s going on until you die.

Here is the simplest definition of “rules” I can think of:

Rules are an agreement you make so that other people will play with you.

That’s it. They aren’t iron-clad universal diktats. They’re choices you make, based on outcomes you want. Some rules have more serious and deadly consequences (like, say, the rules of driving) and others seem to have very light ones – but someone cares about every rule. What you need to figure out is who.

And then ask yourself: is playing with that person worth the rule?

Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, but it’s the people you need to care about, not the rules. A game is only worth playing if you’re playing with exactly who you want.

There are a few ways we can accidentally open ourselves up to being taken advantage of. Ways we can give too much of ourselves to the world. Those are traps and pitfalls to avoid, and here are two:

One – Do not give the majority stake in any important sphere in your life to a single person that isn’t you.

That doesn’t mean you have to control everything yourself. It just means no single entity should control it for you. Don’t get all your news from one source. Don’t be completely dependent on one organization for all your income. Don’t let only one thing make you happy.

Two – Do not allow “treating you well” to become something you view as a perk.

Too often I see people giving others a lot of extra influence, slack, consideration, etc., simply because they don’t treat them like utter garbage. If someone treats you poorly, remove them from your life. That’s good advice, but it doesn’t mean that treating you with respect is a bonus. It’s the standard.

Diversify your sources of the things that are important to you, and then only keep those sources that respect you. Do these things, and you will be much harder to take advantage of.

When I was a teenager, I was a terrible slouch. I had horrible posture. I hunched.

I need to take a moment here to say something that may seem obvious to some of you. To others, it will seem like balderdash. Your thoughts on it will largely be based on your current circumstances, but I need to assure you that what I am about to say is perhaps one of the truest things I will ever write here.

Your posture matters.

It matters immensely. Standing up straight, putting your shoulders further back than your ears and your chin up, using your core muscles to shift your body mass upward, pointing your toes outward and widening your stance a bit – all of these things add about 25%, instantly, to your presence.

You will be more attractive. You will be taken more seriously. You will avoid fights. You will be more observant. You will be more prepared to use your body as it was intended, when needed. You will notice more things. You will be more alert and more aware. Your breathing will improve.

When I was a teenager, and I didn’t know this, my father used to sneak up behind me (which was easy, because I was not alert nor aware and he was crafty), get right behind me, and shove his knuckles between my shoulder blades while yelling out “Stand up straight, boy! Head up, shoulders back!” He did that with such consistency that soon he didn’t need to; if I even felt my shoulders start to sag or my chin to approach my chest that voice would just ring out in my head and I’d snap into position.

My father once left a bar late at night in a bad area, and saw a few guys right outside that didn’t look especially wholesome. My father looked them in the eye and walked past them; nothing else. The next day he was informed by a friend that left that same bar only a few moments later that he had been robbed by those same guys. Obviously, the thieves didn’t stick around for an interview, but it’s worth noting that they chose not to try to rob my father.

You can’t always draw iron-clad conclusions from incidents like that. But they were a part of a lifelong pattern. My father filled a room, and he was not to be trifled with. But if he wanted to seem like a frail old man, it was easy to do.

All he had to do was hunch.

Your posture is one of the greatest returns on effort you can make, as a habit. It requires nothing more than your attention. Almost no physical work is required, and zero money, and mere seconds. But for such a small investment, you can change your life.

It’s good to not get what you want right away. It’s good to have to search, and work, and hustle.

I know it doesn’t seem like it when you want something and don’t have it. But if you achieve everything instantly, you miss out on a tremendous amount of positive externalities. The act of having to search and work for what you want is exactly how you gain sufficient exposure to the world to have goals in the first place.

Imagine someone raised in a featureless room their entire life. Every whim is provided instantly – but without outside stimuli, what kinds of whims could such a person even have? Without awareness of a wider world to shape you, how can you even figure out what to strive for?

So it’s good to have to take a longer road towards what you want. Those roads feel inconvenient at the time, but they make up your whole life.

One of the unique challenges in life is keeping the growth of everything in your life at the pace you want relative to everything else.

Your life has many aspects, and they will change in size over the course of your time on this planet. You’ll make more or less money. Your family will grow or shrink. Your hobbies will take up more or less of your time.

With those things, other things must change. If your family grows in size, you may need a larger home. You’ll certainly need more food. When your children move out, you may want to downsize that home, too.

And with any positive growth can come similarly larger problems. Let’s say I accidentally back into my neighbor’s car when I leave my driveway. I don’t know for certain, but I have an approximate idea of how much such a mistake would cost me, based on the average value of the cars (and homes, etc.) around here.

But what if I suddenly were 10x as wealthy as I am now, and moved to a wealthier neighborhood as a result? It’s still possible that I could back into my neighbor’s car, but now that’s a much more expensive problem because the car I might be backing into is probably much pricier.

(Obviously not a perfect analogy given things like insurance, but you get the idea.)

You can’t always be chasing linear growth in every aspect of your life. The goal isn’t “grow forever” – always more money, more friends, more whatever. The goal is to fill the right amount of space, and then be content. Part of that journey is knowing what “the right amount of space” even is for any given thing.

If you like and want kids, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to just keep having kids forever. But why not? If you love kids, why isn’t “one more” always the right number? You can probably intuitively sense that it isn’t, but can you define why?

The costs, drawbacks, and problems that come with any good thing don’t always grow at the same rate as the good thing itself. Finding the balance – and it’s different for everyone – is key. Look for the space you want to fill, and don’t just chase “up” forever.

One year ago today, the coolest mother fucker on the planet rode off into the sunset for the last time. He cast one hell of a shadow and I was happy to stand in it. I miss him so much.

Nothing else today. Today is a bad day. But he would tell me tomorrow will be better, and I trust him.

Today, while driving in the rain, my middle child made this observation (recorded as close to verbatim as I could get down right away):

“I like rain because it’s beautiful when it hits the puddles. It looks like fireworks, because fireworks start out as a small thing and then explode into a big circle, and that’s what it looks like when rain hits the puddle. It’s a small thing and then it’s a big circle. So they’re both beautiful.”

Such wisdom! Beauty is not found solely in convenience or perfection. It can be found in the inconvenient and the imperfect, for the shapes are not so different. The patterns and experiences we find divine can happen in all manner of circumstances. Do not seek the beautiful – seek life. In all life there is beauty like fireworks, waiting to be observed.

We have a strong tendency to imagine things we want in their idealized form, and then be sorely disappointed if they’re not. But “not ideal” is a far cry from “bad.” Most things you want, you’d be fine having a little damp.

You want to go on that sightseeing tour of the Eiffel Tower? Guess what, they don’t take it down if it rains a little. We should think about the things we want in terms of that thing being damaged, incomplete, or otherwise bearing unwanted conditions. If you still want it, then go for it! If you don’t, then perhaps you don’t really want that thing as much as you want the sunny day.

So enjoy the sunny day all on its own! Bask in the sunshine, forget the rest. If they line up, great. But they don’t have to – and you can often only appreciate so much at a time anyway.

An umbrella is an accessory for the wise and happy, not the gloomy and pessimistic.

Here’s a mental trick to be aware of:

Let’s say someone says something really dumb, like “the Earth is flat.” Then, some well-known authority figure points out that it isn’t, and accompanies this insight with some jests about the stupidity of the first person. Apart from being a little mean maybe, nothing really wrong has happened yet.

But “the Earth is flat” is an easy target, and that’s where the trick comes in. You’d think, “why even bother pointing out that the Earth isn’t flat? Apart from a small handful of kooks, nobody thinks it is. What does the authority figure have to gain by wasting their breath?”

Here’s what they have to gain: the next time someone says something they want to disagree with, even if that thing isn’t foolish, they can pretend it is by making allusions to the prior easy target.

So now someone says something controversial or heterodox but not untrue. The authority figures can say something like, “woosh, where do people like you and the flat Earth people even COME from?!” See the trick?

Don’t get fooled. Being right about one thing doesn’t make you the arbiter of truth, especially if you were picking easy targets to begin with.