Let me tell you a truth: if you are a person of average athletic ability, you are not going to win a gold medal in the next Olympics, no matter how much you “believe in yourself.” Confidence does not replace ability.

But there is a deeper, more important truth: confidence creates ability. It’s just much farther upstream.

If you don’t believe you can do something, then you probably can’t. If you believe you can, that’s not magic. But if you believe you can learn, then you certainly can.

Belief is the seed of wisdom. You can’t learn anything without a belief in your fundamental ability to improve yourself. That’s what requires your faith. You can’t skip the learning step – you can’t go right from confidence to accomplishment. But confidence is what makes the learning step possible.

Hey there, folks! Today, I want to dive deep into the importance of finding positive outlets for those not-so-pleasant experiences that life throws our way. Bad experiences are inevitable. They have a knack for landing right in our laps when we least expect them. But fear not! There’s always a powerful way to turn things around. And I’m not just talking about the cliché “look on the bright side” mentality. No, no. We’re going beyond that today.

Sometimes, the event itself is simply bad. There’s no sugarcoating it, no silver lining to be found. But guess what? That doesn’t mean we’re left empty-handed. Even in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges, we can find a benefit, a lesson, or a chance for growth. It’s all about how we choose to navigate through the rough patches.

Take, for instance, a particularly awful experience that ends up being a powerful lesson for others. By sharing our own experiences, complete with the valuable insights we’ve gained, we have the potential to inspire, educate, and guide those who may encounter similar obstacles down the road. Our hardships become the fuel that propels others toward their own triumphs.

And then there are those times when life decides to dump a pile of undesirable tasks right in our laps. We might find ourselves thinking, “No way! I don’t want to deal with this!” But hold up—don’t throw in the towel just yet. See, even in those moments, we have an opportunity to leverage the situation to our advantage. We can turn the tables, using those tasks as bargaining chips to negotiate a title change, increased compensation, or some other form of recognition. It’s all about finding the output in the negotiation process itself.

Now, here’s a radical thought for you: what if we viewed life’s random events as mere clay—raw material from which we can mold the life we truly desire? Imagine the power in that perspective! Suddenly, those bad experiences don’t seem so daunting. Instead, they become the very building blocks we need to construct the life we want. It’s an empowering mindset, my friends.

By embracing this outlook, we regain a sense of control and agency over our own destinies. We no longer feel like helpless victims of circumstance. Instead, we become architects of our own success, using every experience—good or bad—as a stepping stone toward a brighter future.

So, my friends, let’s remember this: bad experiences are part and parcel of life. We can’t avoid them, but we can navigate through them with grace and determination. Even when there seems to be no immediate upside, we can find value in every situation. Whether it’s turning our trials into lessons for others or transforming unwanted tasks into stepping stones for personal growth, the choice is ours.

So, the next time life throws you a truly bad day, embrace it. Mold it into something beautiful. See it as an opportunity—a chance to shape your life, your way. Remember, you hold the power to turn any negative experience into a force for positive change.

Keep molding that clay.

Sometimes we can feel like we’re forced to choose between “the lesser of two evils,” when we’re faced with a choice between options we’d prefer to avoid altogether. We begrudgingly make our choice (or possibly we’re either clever enough or stubborn enough in that moment to find a way to choose neither) and we move on.

When confronted with the choice between multiple good options, the choice can be much harder!

At least with “evils,” we don’t want any of them. With “goods,” we want them all! So we overextend. There’s a reason there’s no such phrase as “bite off less than you can chew.” That’s nobody’s problem. Instead, people try to do all the fun things, or all the good things, or all the projects.

You need to pick the best one – and only the best one. Do the most good you can while leaving room to breathe. Without that, you won’t be able to sustain, and you’ll miss much more good in the long run.

Imagine if you had a magical device that would give you – just you – an extra hour every day. The rest of the world gets the standard 24, and you get 25. Think for a moment, and decide what you would do with that hour tomorrow.

Okay, did you decide?

Now, answer honestly: whatever you picked, did you do that today with any of the 24 hours you had? Was everything else you did more meaningful, more important to you, than whatever you picked would have been?

Enjoy your hour.

There’s a brick wall in your way, and you bump into it. Your nose hurts, and your path is blocked. You’ve got several options of varying levels of effectiveness now. Probably the least effective of your choices is “yell at the wall.”

You can be mad, and there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s a natural human reaction to pain and frustration. But taking it out on the wall is pretty silly. The wall won’t change in response to your scolding.

Imagine if it did, though? Imagine if every time you screamed at the wall, it got a little higher. Maybe longer, too – harder to go around. Each admonition, no matter how much it satisfied your wrathful impulse, just made your destination harder to reach.

That’s what it’s like when you try it on people.

Using anger as a tool for interacting with other people is the shortest-term solution. If you’re being attacked or you’re in a sporting competition, summoning up a few good shouts and drawing some extra strength from your rage can help, but that’s about the extent of the situations where it’s useful. In every other context, from managing employees to parenting children, a response drawn from anger is a poor choice.

At best, you get a short-term redirection of their action through your manipulation and do enormous damage to your long-term relationship with that person. At worst, you don’t even get that; you just get an equally angry response. In every case, you poison yourself along the way.

It’s tempting, I know. When someone makes you mad, even if you don’t want to “take it out on them,” you at least want them to know that you’re mad, right? That they’ve upset or disappointed you. But consider why you want that: you really want them to change their behavior.

Their new behavior, the actions you want – they’re on the other side of that brick wall. Yelling at the bricks won’t get you closer.

If you want to work on a car, whether to fix, improve, or modify it, you don’t just pop open the hood on the highway and start throwing parts inside. Even if the parts you have are fantastic! You have to get the car somewhere conducive to the activity, like a garage. You have to run proper diagnostics; very importantly, you need to have a good general understanding of how cars work, and what you’d like to be different about this one. You have to have a safe place to take test drives. You can have the best components in the world, but if you don’t do these things, you can’t work on your car.

Working on yourself is no different. You can get fantastic advice, read incredible books, and even absorb daily personal improvement blog posts from incredibly handsome bloggers – none of it will do you any good if you’re just throwing this stuff at your brain while you’re moving around.

Let’s say you read a book about how to be a better parent. That’s awesome! But… what kind of parent are you now? Do you have any idea? Do you have your own “parenting playbook” documented somewhere, with notes or, at least (pardon the pun), crib sheets?

If that book has a nugget of wisdom about a parenting technique, how are you installing that behavior in your personal engine? How are you comparing it to what you already do and deciding which parts need improvement and which don’t? Do you have a safe place to test these new techniques and then re-run the diagnostic? Do you know to do that – one at a time – or do you just try to do everything you read in that book all at once and then revert back entirely in three weeks, all of it forgotten?

The next time you’re about to read something that tells you “How to Get Better at X,” stop. Before you read it, open up a document somewhere and write down how you currently do X. Call this document your “Personal Playbook” and write down your process. Understand it. Decide what you’d like to improve, and why. Then go read the “How to Get Better at X” article, armed with that context.

Did you decide that something in that article was worth trying? Maybe it was “Seven Steps to Improve How You Talk to Your Kid.” Well, push back the idea that you can try all seven steps at once. Pick one. Say, “I’m going to try this for one month.” Write down what you hope will happen. Write it down, I said. Then don’t try to improve or change anything else for a month.

At the end of the month, evaluate. Did you get what you were hoping for? If you did, then awesome! Change your Personal Playbook to reflect the new technique. Then, pick another item – or a new topic. If you didn’t, reflect – maybe you should try it again, but not every piece of advice works for every person. Try a different one, commit for a month, and repeat.

Rinse and repeat. Improve one thing at a time, in a safe “testing environment,” and then work it into an actual playbook of your best habits. Otherwise, you’re just throwing carburetors at a running engine and hoping something improves.

Fear can paralyze you. You fear a specific event or outcome, and it causes you to despair. I’ve seen this happen many times; someone gets a new job but immediately gets the sense that they aren’t going to succeed there. They’re terrified that they’re going to lose their job, but mostly what they do is hunker down and try their best to avoid notice. Then, a few months later, they lose their job regardless.

Try this instead: accept the premise. Take it as a given that your specific fear is going to come true and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Imagine that for a moment. You look around your job and think “This isn’t the right environment for me. I’m definitely going to get laid off.” And instead of being afraid, you just consider the ramifications:

“Okay, if I’m going to be laid off in two months, then those two months are important. I should start my job search process now in my spare time, and while I’m here I should use the time I have to learn as much as possible. While I do have a job I can network and make connections, pick up new skills, learn about the industry, and make a good impression on those around me so I maybe leave with a decent referral or two, and I’ll already have a head start on the next job hunt.”

Obviously, that’s a better set of actions than wallowing – sure, it sucks that you’ll lose your job, but if we take that as a given, this is a better way to respond to those facts than pretending they aren’t true. But did you notice something else about those actions? They’re also the ones most likely to lead to you not getting fired!

If you learn a bunch of stuff and impress people around you, maybe you’ll turn that ship around and save it. But even if you don’t, you’ll have done the best you could with the situation you had and used it as a springboard to a better circumstance. All because you just took your fear as a given and moved past it instead of spending all of your energy on the fear itself.

Imagine you have a pitcher with 3 cups of water in it. On the table are two empty glasses, each of which can hold 2 cups of water. With the water in your pitcher, you cannot fill both cups.

A reasonable discussion can be had about which cup you should fill and which you shouldn’t, or whether you should perhaps not fill either cup all the way, but you cannot fill both cups.

A reasonable discussion can be had about how you’re making the above decision, but you cannot fill both cups.

A reasonable discussion can be had about how you get water into the pitcher in the first place, whether you should be able to get more, and how you might do so; but with the water in the pitcher, you cannot fill both cups.

A reasonable discussion can be had about whether or not you wasted some water that was in the pitcher previously, perhaps by spilling it accidentally or deliberately pouring it somewhere else, but in the here and now you cannot fill both cups.

Sometimes – not always but sometimes – you get people who don’t want to have any of those reasonable discussions. They just want to yell about the fact that both cups aren’t full and act as if it’s happening either because the person holding the pitcher isn’t pouring harder or because 3 cups of water actually can fill two 2-cup containers if you believe hard enough.

Those people are unreasonable. Look for those who aren’t, and solve the problem with them.

People often avoid demonstrating a skill because they’re self-conscious about it. They don’t think it’s good enough or they worry about what others will think of it, so they hold it back. You may have done this.

I am absolutely, completely, 100% NOT self-conscious about my clarinet playing. You could insult me about it and I wouldn’t bat an eye. You could say I’m the worst clarinet player in the world and it wouldn’t phase me at all; I am immune to such barbs and the thought of being exposed to them wouldn’t cost me a second of sleep. Why?

I don’t play the clarinet.

It’s not even a skill I have. I’ve never claimed to have it, so no one can call me a liar. I’ve never put a second of work into it, so I can’t worry that I’ve wasted a second of work. I cannot be judged, I cannot fail, I cannot be unfavorably compared to another clarinet player.

Do you realize what that means?

It means that self-consciousness is an indicator of competence.

The skills you feel self-conscious about are the skills you’ve invested in emotionally. It has to be that way – without emotional investment, there’s nothing to feel self-conscious about. But that same investment is also likely paired with time and practice, so the very skills you’re most self-conscious of are the same skills you’ve spent the most time practicing and improving.

So if you don’t feel very confident about something – great! That means it’s probably among your best skills, and you’re well on your way to being absolutely wonderful at it. You’re certainly much better already than you think you are.

And no matter what, you’re a better clarinet player than I am.