About 20% of what we see or hear is what’s there. The other 80% is the mirror it bounces off, in our own minds. We see ourselves in everything, project ourselves onto everything.

Some people see this as a hurdle to overcome. The standard advice is to try to be more open, to project less, to assume less. That’s all valid in terms of understanding the message, and it’s good advice for what it is.

But you don’t necessarily have to ignore those internal signals. You can harvest them. I’m of the view that any natural byproduct of our brain’s functions should at least try to be recycled since it’s going to happen anyway.

When you take one of those ink-blot tests, the very point is to harvest your projected assumptions and biases. You’re trying to learn something about your own brain by evaluating what you think meaningless random blobs are. And in the same way that what you see in the clouds might reflect what you’re really ruminating on, it can give a lot of insight.

So use it! Someone says something, and you immediately assume a particular meaning. Catch yourself before you respond, yes. But don’t disregard your first instinct. Instead, examine it. Why did I react that way? What would someone else have thought? What is my brain trying to tell me about what I need?

The whole world is your Rorschach test. You might as well take it.

Most people aren’t soothsayers. It can be downright impossible to project our minds forward in time in order to see a project in its completed state. Fortunately, we don’t have to be prognosticators in order to see the future – if we’re the ones creating it.

You’re visualized prediction is a target. A point in space and time that you’re going to use as a guiding light – your own personal North Star.

You don’t have to be perfect, but the more you can truly visualize that end, the more driven you will become to achieve it. So how do we sharpen our future sight?

We add context.

Most people have difficulty visualizing a completed project because completed projects don’t exist in featureless white vacuums. They’re successful because of what they do, how they allow you to interact with the world. So forget about the project for a moment, and let’s visualize that context.

Imagine a person thanking you for your work. Make it someone you know. What are they saying? Write down a few notes about the kinds of feedback you’d like to receive.

Imagine other projects you can do after this one. Why are you better prepared to launch into those things now that you’ve completed this one? Write down a few notes about what could happen next.

Imagine you’re mentoring someone in the future because they want to engage with a similar project of their own, and they want to benefit from your experience. What would you be able to tell them? What skills could you transfer? Write down a few notes about how you want to develop personally.

Now take all of those notes and construct a narrative. Tell the story of how you’re complimented and thanked for your work, how you share it with others, and what you start to do next. The biggest gap in this story will be the project itself, but that gap will be so much easier to fill in once you’re excited about everything else.

Now you can see the space you’re aiming for. With every step, you’ll get closer.

Some people throw a ball, and as soon as it’s out of their hand, they’re done thinking about it. “I’ve done my part, the ball is in flight, and whatever happens now is on somebody else.”

Other people throw a ball and need to see it get caught. Without that knowledge, without the visual confirmation that the ball reached its intended destination, they can’t settle their brain. The ball can miss or land, but they need to know.

These two mindsets are very different. There’s nothing wrong with either, but there’s a lot of difficulty in trying to maneuver through life without awareness of which one you are.

This is shorthand for how much information you want about the world. There’s such a thing as information overload, but there’s also such a thing as confused ignorance. Where that line gets drawn is different for each person, and if you don’t land more or less where you want, you’ll be unhappy.

You are aware of your life in a way that is impossible for the lives of others. Whenever you compare all of your life to only a specific aspect of someone else’s, that comparison will be flawed.

If look at your life, with all its struggles, and compare it to only the best part of someone else’s, you’ll feel inadequacy and jealousy – whether that’s a peer or your own grandfather. You’ll see their nice house and assume their life was entirely better, but clearly, this is wrong.

Likewise, if you look only at a single poor decision in someone else’s life, it’s easy to feel superior. It’s easy to feel like you’d never make that decision, never fall into that trap. This too is clearly wrong.

Without the whole picture, without the struggles and pains and thorns and mud, you can’t just pluck these little moments and slot them into your own life seamlessly. Be wary of those moments when your brain tries to do so anyway. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from the lives of others, but those lessons are only valuable to extent that you test them incrementally in your own.

Other people’s lives are not the yardstick of yours.

I have a particular weakness, a form of frustration that I’m very vulnerable to. It’s “active waiting,” and I’ve written about it before. Basically, I tend to get frustrated when I have to spend time doing nothing.

However, I’ve been working on it. Like all flaws, this one is a chance for reflection. Today I was very “busy doing nothing.” I shepherded my children to various events today; events at which I had nothing to do but wait around for them to finish said event. That’s being a parent sometimes!

And yet, despite the hectic schedule today, I found myself surprisingly un-flustered. I chalk it up to two things:

1. I didn’t try to avoid it. Because of how much I dislike active waiting, I often try to avoid it by grabbing small tasks that I can do along the way. “Gee, maybe if I bring my tablet I can answer some work emails while I’m in the waiting room…” Ugh. That never works well and now I’m also flustered by a different failure. Today, I just said, “I’m going to end up spending a good part of the day in waiting rooms, and that’s fine.” It helped a bunch.
2. Because I wasn’t trying to avoid it, I got out of my own head a bit and just enjoyed smaller things. I watched people, which I almost always enjoy. I let conversations be struck. I read things I found. It was a nice day.

Sometimes all it takes for joy to leak into your life is for you to not actively insulate against it with an endless array of activities.

If you pick up a handful of snow and hand it to someone else, some will fall away, forgotten. That person will pick up a little more and pack it in before handing the snowball off, and some more will fall away. And so on and so on through a hundred pairs of hands, each adding a little snow and letting some fall. When it’s in the hundredth pair of hands, not more than a tiny handful of flakes might be retained from the original clump – if that – but all the same, they’ve been playing with the same snowball.

Such it is with culture. Every great book you read, movie you watch, song you love: these are snowflakes. You’ll build with them with your loved ones, and some will fall away. They’ll add their own.

All this is as it should be. At the core of it all is the shape, the way a snowball forms and is full of joy no matter the shapes of the snowflakes within it.

I don’t know if every movie I enjoy with my children will be a movie they eventually share with theirs. But it doesn’t matter. Today, my daughter and I watched Beetlejuice, and we laughed together, and then we danced together, and that moment was joy. That shape is eternal.

At any given point, your brain is dividing its attention between whatever you’re doing right now, and whatever else you’d like to be thinking about.

If you’re trying to disarm a bomb, it would be really great if 100% of your focus was on that task. Active distractions should be cleared – no loud sounds, no flashing lights, no one poking you in the arm. But you need to get rid of passive distractions, too. If your spouse just walked out on you last night, that might be taking up a big part of your mindshare.

Positive things can take up mindshare, too. If you’re really excited for an upcoming concert this weekend, thinking about that experience can be taking up a lot of your mental space, distracting you from your focus.

These experiences are part of life, but keeping them from owning your mental space and energy is important. So what do we do with them?

I give them their space – but I fence them in.

I carry a small, physical notebook with me that I exclusively use to vent these kinds of thoughts. Often the desire to think about something is synonymous with the desire to communicate about it. If I’m excited about that concert, I just want to tell someone how excited I am. So I’ll give myself five minutes and write about that – and then close the book and be able to go back to my work.

Create your outlet for things that you find occupying your mindshare. Often, they’re jus trying to get out – so let them.

Happy new month!

It’s the shortest, and often the bleakest month of the year. But today I started it off with joy, as my children lept from their beds to the sight of the first snow of the year on our front lawn. They raced out of the house with the sun still barely peeking over the treeline to pick up the sparse dusting of magic.

So that’s my theme, my resolution, for this month. It’s a short month, and I have a lot to do. Several deadlines are looming, several major projects need my attention, and several important life events are right around the corner. But amid it all, I will not lose sight of the early dawns full of magic and I will not miss the opportunity to race into them, cold and smiling.

Wish me luck, as I wish you!