The deeper you are into a particular topic, the more granular and detailed your observations are. This is a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because those little details matter when it comes to effective work and expertise within the topic. It’s a curse because that level of granularity is an insulation against effective communication.

If you pick a topic you’re an expert in and voice your most nuanced opinion, then people who aren’t in your world won’t know what the heck you’re talking about.

Here’s how to fix it:

1. Find a person who knows nothing about your topic, but who is generally smart and friendly.
2. Remember that they are smart. This is important.
3. Tell them about your topic, and let them keep asking questions and requesting clarifications until they understand. Remember that they are smart – they’ll seem dumb to you. But that’s because you’ll be in your zone of genius, and not theirs. You’d seem equally dumb trying to understand their thing.
4. When they finally have a grasp of what you’re talking about, ask them to give you a summary. Check it for accuracy, but not detail. They’ll be missing nuance, of course. You just don’t want them to be totally wrong.
5. There, now that’s how you explain what you do to someone who doesn’t get it.

This is a vital process to master. If you can’t communicate outside of your tiny, tiny little bubble, then it becomes a tomb.

It was an unusual day. I did several things I don’t normally do today: I visited a site of historical importance and I went on a podcast. I don’t do either of those things with any regularity, though I’ve done both before. That alone makes the day good, in my view.

Unusual things lead to new ideas. New connections between examples. New slivers of Venn diagrams overlapping with other unusual experiences you’ve had in the past.

Learning requires reinforcement. It requires some degree of repetition, and then integration with your life. If you want to learn a new language, you can’t just read every word in the vocabulary once and then bam, you’re fluent. You have to learn it, then use it, then refine it. You have to speak the language badly for a while. You have to put it into your life.

So how do you do that with things that aren’t cut-and-dry skills? If that’s how you teach yourself Spanish, how do you teach yourself curiosity? How do you teach yourself wonder?

It’s the same. First, you learn a little bit. You get curious about something and you examine what it’s like to be curious, to stand on the edge of not knowing. But then you have to use that curiosity; you have to put it into your life. You have to make curiosity lead to something else that you want, just as you try to get speaking Spanish to lead to being able to order the food you want or find la biblioteca.

Then you have to refine that, over and over. You make connections between the words for different things and the web of rules that connect them, and in the same way, you make connections between the times you were curious and how it led to what you want. You travel to a Spanish-speaking country so you’re forced to integrate into it. You join a club where you don’t know anything so you have to be curious to thrive.

It’s all the same methodology. It’s letting the thing live in you and change you in the direction you want.

So when I do unusual things, I am happy. They are buoyant, and I float on them. My world moves forward. I become more fluent in curiosity.

I am a minimalist. I try to have few things, I try to reduce my dependence on things, and – most importantly – I try not to invest emotional resonance into things. I am not perfect in this regard, of course. I do own things, some of which I find very useful. I have some things that aren’t useful at all, but I like them and so I keep them. And I have a few things that carry emotional weight.

But on that last charge, I have a secret weapon. Once an object carries emotional weight, I do something new with it.

I look for where it will go next.

Try this. When you are about to end a chapter, no matter how great or how small, look for an object in your life that represents that chapter. Your ID badge from a job you’re leaving. The ignition key from the car that got totaled. A trinket from an ex-partner.

Invest those emotions into that object. Hold it as you imagine the scenes that make up that part of your story. Hold the weight of it.

Then, take it somewhere else and let it go. Leave it as a treasure, cast it into the sea, burn it on a camping trip. But close that chapter.

This isn’t about destruction. This is about acceptance. It’s about acknowledging that not everything that has ever been a part of you must remain so forever, and that things that leave you still shape you.

Your life is a series of changes, every day and every year. To cling is to make the ride painful when it should be joyous. You cannot keep anything. You can decide where you leave it.

Any change you want to make to the world will involve disrupting the natural order. Doing that requires energy and causes friction. The river puts the water where it wants; if you want the water somewhere else, you have to disrupt the river.

That means that some people will be upset, even if the changes you’re trying to bring about are pretty universally good. Even if the people involved want the changes, they’ll resist the process to get there.

Resistance isn’t the same thing as reluctance. It takes effort to move a rock, but that’s not because the rock doesn’t want to be moved. It’s just a fact of the universe that change requires energy to overcome inertia.

When I was young, I had two very distinct and separate rule sets imposed on my behavior. One was the “standard set,” which covered when I had to be home, what I was allowed to do, and all of the other boundaries around what was considered “acceptable behavior” for a lad my age.

Then there was the second set of rules, which completely overruled the first set whenever I was out and about with my cousins. Normal curfew of 8 PM – out with the cousins? Come home whenever. Not allowed to go into the woods on the far side of town – out with the cousins? Go wherever you want. If I got caught fighting while on my own, there’d be hell to pay – but if I had been out with my cousins and came home covered in blood with a human hand in my possession, no one would have questioned anything.

The lesson wasn’t just implied, it was explicit: the bonds of family are so worth forging that rules that get in the way of that are to be discarded. Rules are for safety, but in the minds of our clan, you were never safer than you were with a roving horde of your own kin.

And so it continues to this day. My own children are about to end their Spring Break and return to school tomorrow, so I told them I wanted a low-key day, early to bed, not a bunch of snacks, etc. But then The Cousins showed up at the door, and the whole lot of them vanished for the rest of the afternoon, showing back up well past their normal bedtime covered in ice cream.

Along the way they passed a few relatives who caught pictures of them wandering around town:

(Yes, everyone in that picture is related to me. Yes, they even took a stroller-bound toddler cousin with them on their adventures. The age range in this picture is 2 to 18. This has never been an issue and I don’t know why some people think it is.)

Despite my original plan for the day, I endorse the actual results with every fiber of my being. The bonds of clan are more important. No rule will make them safer or stronger than days spent wandering around their turf with roving hordes of their kin. And the children in this picture get this joyous life because of the bonds of their parents and grandparents before them.

If you have this family, treasure it. Don’t take it for granted – nurture and encourage it. If you don’t already have this family, find it. Families like this one take in strays; you can be a best friend or a neighbor or a spouse and it’s all the same to us. You just have to join the horde – or let it take you out for ice cream past your bedtime.

There’s a running joke among contractors that their own houses are always in terrible repair. This seems to be a common occurrence: whatever thing you help others with the most can end up being a thing you don’t do for yourself as much as you should.

It makes sense. It’s easier to be objective and see the tactical elements when you remove emotional proximity. That’s what friends (and professionals) are for; to help you make the decisions when you’re too close to them.

The biggest lesson to take away is just to have a general sense of how “big” any decision is. Above a certain threshold, you should default to running it through a few cooler heads, even if you feel confident. The decisions you feel most sure of are often the ones with the biggest blind spots.

I know this, but I’m still – like everyone – struggling with it. I stormed through life on my stubbornly independent path. My unique approach was my strength, but it means that more than once I find myself re-inventing the wheel. Doing things the hard way just because the hard way is also the independent way. I’d rather invent than research.

I’m working on it.

Old habits die hard.

You will, in your life, worry about a shocking number of things you can’t fail at.

Your internal struggle is real, but it’s very separate from external reality. You may be afraid to try a new restaurant, break off a bad relationship, or send an email to a potential client, but you can’t actually fail to do those things. It’s only a mountain if you make it one.

Don’t try to not be afraid. Let yourself be afraid, let yourself be nervous, let anxiety blanket you like freshly fallen snow. And then just do it anyway, because those things don’t physically stop you.

There are things you do because they are ends, and there are things you do because they are means. Don’t confuse them.

When you’re “paying your dues,” remember that you’re doing that for a reason. It’s not because you like paying dues. It’s because you’re getting something back.

The trap closes around you because there’s a certain kind of mindset that you need to adopt in order to pay dues effectively. If you’re interning at a company and you want to maximize the experience, you need to adopt a sort of “intern mindset” full of cheerfulness, eagerness, and almost sycophantic obsequiousness. If you attend to your intern duties begrudgingly, you won’t get anywhere near the full value – that of skills, certainly, but also network, lessons, etc.

The way the trap closes is you get so used to that mindset that you forget when it’s time to shed it. You don’t realize when you’ve crossed over into someone who needs to pay dues and become someone who needs to be paid them. Someone who can advocate their own unique value.

You’re trading something when you do those things. Don’t forget the other half of the trade.

It’s far easier to observe bias in other people than in ourselves. Remember, only other people have accents, right? Your point of view is the “normal” one, and everyone else deviates from it somehow, obviously. We see other people as “extreme” or “fringe,” as if we were standing in the middle of some big circle that actually has edges.

Now look, the Overton Window is real and all, but you’re not in the dead center of the opening. And when you observe someone else and decide that they’re “radical,” always keep in mind that your primary basis for that opinion is how they interact with you.

If someone is very stand-offish in every interaction you have with them, you might think, “gee, that person is a big jerk.” But it could be that they just don’t like you. And maybe they don’t like you because you’re a big jerk. If the only road from your hometown goes to Rome, it’s easy to say “all roads lead to Rome.” But that’s way more of a function of you than of the international highway system.

This is really, really hard to internalize. We don’t see ourselves in the third person while simultaneously holding the greater world in our minds. We have our base frame of reference and we rely on it to operate.

But stick your head up, now and then. Especially when you’re forming an opinion of someone else. What you think is an objective observation of that person’s relationship to normalcy is actually their subjective relationship to you.

I’m a fan of reducing external dependence. If some part of your happiness is dependent on an external factor, then some part of your happiness will always be outside of your control. No man is an island and we’re social creatures, so I’m not advocating isolationism or even true minimalism (unless that works for you!).

What I’m advocating is… less-ism.

People often try to completely eliminate an external dependence, but all they do is create pent-up demand. People do things like “Dry January” and then go on a full-on bender on February 1st. That’s not helping anything; it might even be worsening your dependence.

Arbitrarily limiting something only to pine after it every day and then over-indulge the second the waiting period is over isn’t claiming control over your life. It’s just playing silly games.

Try, instead, to lessen. To reduce the amount of an external thing you engage with, in exchange for an equal or greater amount of inner work. You don’t have to stop watching television cold turkey, but get rid of one show and replace it with a thoughtful walk. You don’t have to stop drinking entirely, but replace Sunday drinks with Sunday phone calls to loved ones.

There are things in your heart that can make you happy, but they’re buried under many distractions. If you try to force it away all at once, you simply replace it with longing for that thing. I advocate trying to go without, but only thoughtfully – because you truly want the distance and to respect the thing. Not because you’re trying to prove something to someone else and then go right back even harder.

Take a breath, and do a little less.