Imagine you’re playing a trivia game. Every time you give a right answer you get a dollar, and every time you give a wrong answer you lose a dollar. Imagine your strategy for such a game. If it were me, I’d make sure I only attempted to answer questions where I was pretty sure (at least 51%, anyway) that I knew the right answer. If I started to get a few wrong, I’d adjust my confidence levels. If I had gotten a good number right then I might loosen up a little, but I’d still base my strategy on what I knew.

Now, imagine a trivia game with slightly different rules: every time you give a right answer you get a dollar, and every time you give a wrong answer nothing happens. Your strategy would be very different, wouldn’t it? If it were me, I’d buzz in every single time and I’d spout off as many answers as the rules allowed. If I could guess more than one time per question I’d just start shouting random words and phrases if I didn’t know the answer. Why not?

Now here’s the hack: Life is a lot more like the second game.

Most of the time, being “right” about something nets you some positive reward, but being wrong doesn’t lose you anything. If you ask out a hundred people and one says yes and gives you a wonderful relationship, the other 99 don’t take anything away. If you tell a hundred people that they look like exactly the person that needs to buy the widget you’re selling and one of them agrees, then you sold one widget – and the other 99 people don’t take anything away.

This is also a nasty trick if used for evil. Be aware of it. People will say things like “20 people died after getting this shot!” as if that was meaningful. You go: “Oh wow, 20 people!” But guess what? If I ask enough, I can find 20 people who died after eating a carrot, too. The eight million I asked who didn’t know anyone who died from carrot consumption? They don’t factor in, because they didn’t take anything away from my “study.” So be careful; you have to ask about the secret denominator.

But there’s the thing. For better or worse, the denominator is often invisible. We care about the number of times you get it right, not the number of total attempts. Most games allow unlimited replays, and the only cost is your time. That’s helpful to you when you’re trying to get things done; it’s hurtful to you if you aren’t aware of other people pulling a fast one.

Asking “out of how many” is good practice. For yourself, it can improve your performance, even though you should always remember your goal is a higher number of “rates per time” not a higher ratio of “rights to wrongs.” And for others, it can keep them honest – or at least keep yourself aware.

Lots of things in the world are dangerous. In virtually every case, the only way to make them less dangerous is to get exposure to them.

Driving a car is dangerous! We definitely shouldn’t take someone who has never even seen a car before and stick them behind the wheel on a busy freeway. And yet, people do get behind the wheel on busy freeways all the time. How do we manage? By getting small doses of exposure to the danger of driving in safe(r) environments.

It’s the same with literally everything. The wild, unconstrained internet can be a dangerous place for the uninitiated. So… initiate them. Small doses, careful training. Progressively larger cages until freedom.

The freakin’ stove is dangerous, man. Crossing the street is dangerous. Driving a forklift is dangerous. Handling chemicals or snakes or guns is dangerous. It’s all dangerous.

Life is danger. It’s constantly trying to kill you. The path to survival is exposure to it.

Here is a framework for thinking about larger projects, the kinds that often take extended periods of time and different sub-projects to complete.

First, figure out the individual “buckets” that need to be filled in order to complete the project. For example, if you’re trying to plan a party, you might need a “Manage the Guest List” bucket, a “Plan the Activities” bucket, a “Purchase Supplies” bucket, etc. The party doesn’t happen unless each bucket gets filled.

The “bucket” system is helpful because it helps you not only organize actions, but it helps you eliminate them. If you think of some activity you feel like you “should” do, you can ask: “What bucket does this help fill?” If you can’t immediately figure out which bucket it is, then you have to ask a second question: “Does that mean I missed a bucket, or does that mean I shouldn’t do this thing?“

(It is very often the latter!)

Next, for each bucket, there are likely barriers. Things in the way of you completing your task of filling that bucket. We’ll call them “rocks,” because they make the bucket feel heavy and full, but they aren’t what you actually need. The “Manage the Guest List” bucket might have a big rock in it labeled “Janet and Bill really don’t get along.” It might have a small rock in it labeled “I don’t have Mirabel’s new phone number.” But these rocks all have to be removed.

It can be tough to figure out which rocks need the most immediate attention, but here’s an easy question: “If I don’t remove this rock, what happens?” It seems obvious, but whenever a task seems like it should be done, we frequently skip that question. Many little pebbles won’t hurt your overall effort, but some of the biggest rocks will completely derail you.

If you start a project by labeling:

1. Which buckets need to be filled?
2. What activities fill them?
3. What rocks need to be removed?

You’re well on your way to staying clear and focused.

With every interaction you have with another human, you’re plunging them into a mystery.

You begin with a statement, and now the other person has this puzzle to solve: “Where is this coming from?”

Remember, in order for you to take the initiative to talk to another human, a whole lot of things had to happen. All of those events, questions, thoughts, and feelings that strung together to inspire you to go talk to Bob from Accounting or your Aunt Susan or whoever? You witnessed and experienced them. The other person did not.

So the other person has no idea what’s happening, they don’t know the context. And when humans don’t know something, they assume.

These assumptions are often uncharitable!

Masting the art of “providing context” is mastering the art of effective communication. If you want a little extra practice, consider asking yourself a few questions just before you start a new interaction with someone else. Imagine they ask you, right away, “Why are you asking/telling me this?” How would you respond? Build that explanation into your original statement and you’ll save a lot of time and effort.

A second practice question involves assuming resistance. What if they say: “I don’t have time to help you with this. Why should it be my priority?” Give that one a lot of thought, and build your response in as well. This one is extra good because it also helps filter out conversations that don’t value the other person’s time!

Try these exercises this week, and watch your interactions grow in effectiveness. Don’t let them just drop out of the blue.

My yard was full of children today, an event that always brings me great joy. I genuinely love the hours when my home is the center of people’s fun. I love gathering friends around a table for a meal or for games, I love having children running through my house as they play, and I love when family laughs within these walls.

Joy is, almost always, chaos. I don’t love chaos – I love my orderly neatness, my quiet control. But I love these joyous moments of chaos more, all the same. I wouldn’t give them up; in fact, I work hard to foster them.

The beautiful thing about the joy of others is that it becomes your joy by simple proximity. All you have to do is let it wash over you, and you can have it all without diminishing it in others. That’s worth making the time for.

No matter how much you want this not to be true, there will always be some people you can’t help.

This is a painful experience. Some of those people actually want your help – or at least, they think they do. They’re the hardest ones. Some people need your help but don’t want it, and it’s a little easier there.

But in any case, grappling with the limits of your powers is never fun. You, however, are finite – you have a limited capacity to help. Regardless of the pain, remember that you have to put your time and effort where it will have the greatest impact. As hard as it is, identify and act, then move on. Do what you can, but don’t do what you can’t.

If you knew the odds, you wouldn’t play.

Imagine a great wheel for you to spin. ‘Round and ’round it goes, stopping on one of a hundred different sections. 99 of them contain a painful shock for you – the last contains all your dreams made manifest.

One in a hundred isn’t exactly great odds. If you knew them, it might be reasonable to be afraid of the shocks, avoid the pain.

It’s a good thing you don’t know them, then. It’s a good thing you think the odds are maybe one in ten or better – and the shocks aren’t that bad, anyway.

What you must endure in order to see your dreams become real is too much. Too much to bear… all at once. But you don’t have to do it all at once. Spin the wheel once, take your shock. Grow stronger. Spin again tomorrow.

Grow stronger.

Forget the odds.

We often catch “public people” like celebrities or politicians in breaches of ethics that seem absurd. Absurd for two reasons: not only because the actual behavior is atrocious, but because it seems like it should be obvious that it’s atrocious.

You’ve seen this happen, I’m sure. A public figure gets caught doing something horrible, but the manner in which they got caught is because they just talked about it openly to people or made no attempt to hide it (or at least, no attempt that would pass even the most basic level of investigation).

Why does this happen? Is it that some people are so horrible that they flaunt the most basic moral rules with utter disregard?

That might be a small percentage, but I think there’s a different force at play. I think the “obviousness” of ethical rules relies on a certain kind of life, and that life gets wildly distorted when you reach the outer fringes of publicity. In other words, I think some people just enter a world that’s so weird, and stay in it for so long, that the basic ethical rules stop being obvious.

A lot of “ethics” is us mostly trying to figure out how to live in a society in which we have relatively comparable (even if not actually equal) levels of power and authority with the people around us. In its most basic form, for example, you learn as a kid not to hit people primarily because you don’t want to be hit, and anyone you throw a punch at could throw one back. So we try to figure out the rules that keep us all safe and happy.

But imagine your life was such that it was actually impossible for anyone to hit you? For a really long time? And any time you even accidentally hurt someone, no one ever called you on it? And when other people in your world hit people, nothing bad happened to them? How long might it be before it was no longer obvious to you that you shouldn’t hit someone?

So then you might punch someone in the face and not try to excuse yourself or cover it up, not because you’re flaunting the basic rules of an ethical society, but because you don’t actually realize what those rules are.

The broader lesson here is to be very aware of how our circumstances can affect what we view as correct moral behavior. Be aware of your own biases – and the biases of others. Don’t let your weird world go to your head – or poison your heart.

I am strongly, massively in favor of emotional regulation. I think it’s the ultimate skill; I think pretty much everything else flows from it. I think it’s one of the most important lessons to teach children; in fact, it’s so important that if it’s the only thing you teach you’re probably a great parent. I think many parents don’t teach it, and as a result lots of adults don’t know it, so it’s good for everyone.

Because of this stance, many people who interact with me regularly think that I’m anti-emotion; that I’m cold or repressed because I don’t fly off the handle even when things upset me. But nothing could be further from the truth. I think our emotions are incredible; they bring us the joy that makes life worth living. I don’t think we survive despite them; I think we thrive because of them.

But I want you to imagine something for a moment. Imagine a piano, but someone has tampered with it. They’ve gone inside and they’ve taken every string and moved it, so that instead of all 88 being in order they’re essentially random. There’s no correlation between which key you hit and what sound gets made. And every other day or so, this prankster goes inside while you’re sleeping and moves them around again.

No matter how carefully you pressed the correct keys, the piano would never make the sounds you wanted. The beautiful melodies would be replaced by discord.

Emotional regulation isn’t pulling out the strings entirely. It’s putting them back in the right order so that the actions we take produce incredible music, instead of cacophony.

It means aligning our actions and the emotions we want, and understanding how our emotions drive the next action we take. It’s putting ourselves in harmony so that we can enjoy our emotions, rather than letting them torture us until we run from them. It’s turning noise into rapture.

Like playing piano, it takes practice. Like the most beautiful song, it’s worth the effort.

The best time to reflect on what you’ve accomplished is before you get to work on it in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong – I believe in reflection, even if I’m not great at it. But if you’re trying to specifically reflect as a learning exercise, then it’s not worth very much unless you’re comparing it to a prediction. Remember the scientific method? First you form a hypothesis, then you experiment. If you experiment first, you’re exposing yourself to all sorts of bias.

So if you’ve just accomplished something and you want to reflect on how you did – don’t. You don’t have a counterfactual, you’ll attribute to skill what might be luck, and you won’t know how to repeat it yet. Instead, form a hypothesis about how you might do it again – and how you might repeatable-ize it. Then when you’re done, you’ll have something to compare it to, and your reflection will be worth far more.