Imagine you are a scientist, testing whether a particular process will yield the result you anticipate. You do the first experiment, and the process does not, in fact, yield that result. Which of the following is an appropriate internal reaction to have?

A. “Time to record this information and move on to the next experiment.”
B. “I should adjust my experiments so that I’m more likely to get that result next time.”
C. “This process is bad and I should abandon it entirely.”
D. “I’m a bad scientist, and I definitely don’t belong here.”

That’s right, the correct answer is “A.” You know this. Yet many, many times people will take actions that align with the other three internal reactions, all the way to “D!”

I’ve seen it. Someone applies for one job in a new field. They get a rejection letter. Their reaction? “I guess I don’t belong in that field.”

A good scientist knows the true wisdom: “Data” is plural. You can’t make huge decisions from one result. You can’t take one failure and make it core to your identity. You need to make your failures atomic: small, isolated from the rest of your behaviors, and used for data collection.

You will fail. A bunch of times! If you let every one of them affect you in profound ways, your life will become warped beyond recognition.

Some resilience is always necessary to be a scientist. But the method works.

You can’t charge tolls on burnt bridges. Don’t destroy capital assets. If it’s caused you a loss, that’s not relevant; what’s relevant is whether or not it will be a net gain or loss in the future.

I believe that the secret to a happy life is to embrace unfairness.

Here are the things that, in my experience, cause people to be deeply unhappy:

1. A lack of self-worth; a sense that your life is a net negative for the world. The stain on the soul that comes from selfishness.
2. Expecting something that doesn’t happen.

That’s it. Those two categories encompass pretty much everything that makes people deeply unhappy. You can be miserable because you’re not doing the right things to keep your soul in shape, and you can be unhappy because you’ve projected the solutions to your unhappiness out into the world and the world failed to live up to that impossible ideal.

What does this have to do with unfairness?

Well, that means that in order to be happy, you have to embrace a contradiction. According to premise #1, in order to be happy you need to do things for others – you need to make the world better and treat people with kindness, honesty, and generosity. And according to premise #2, you need to do that without ever expecting that anyone else will do the same in return.

That’s pretty unfair!

But if you do it, here’s the thing: you will be happy.

All of my moments of unhappiness have come from straying from one of those two premises. I’ve been unhappy when I’ve treated others more poorly than I should have, and I’ve been unhappy when I’ve expected others to treat me better than they did. But both of those things are under my control.

The dark sickness of the spirit comes from the terrible trick your mind tries to play on you. Your mind says that because you are kind to the world, you should expect the world to be kind to you. And then the world says because the world wasn’t kind to you, you no longer have to be kind to the world.

And if you listen to those words and embrace them, you will be unhappy for the rest of your life. Perfect fairness is being a miserable bastard to the world forever, and getting miserable bastardry in return. That’s perfectly fair, and no way to live.

You must demand better from yourself than you expect from the world. If you do that – and never fall into the trap that they are in any way connected – then you will be happy. It isn’t fair, but it is good. It is good that your own happiness is so directly connected to things you can control. Do unto others not as you would have them do unto you, but do unto them far, far better than you would ever expect in return.

And be happy.

If you want to improve your life dramatically, learn to be right about things without other people needing to be wrong about them.

There are many things I believe I’m right about. While I’m never 100% certain, I’m certain enough to act upon them – to let these beliefs influence my life. Sometimes, I see people publicly stating the opposite of the thing I believe to be true. Do you know what I do about it?

Nothing.

Why would I? Me being right doesn’t depend on them being wrong. I don’t need to correct them, convince them, or prove anything to them. I just keep living my life. Most of those people have zero power over me, so I gain nothing by going out of my way to interact with them.

In other words, I can be independently right. I don’t need to win my right-hood from anyone else. Often I see people falling over themselves to make sure other people know how wrong they are about this or that, and the world just keeps right on spinning. You waste a few breaths, you get frustrated, and along the way, you get a little more close-minded, too. Just the experience of being frustrated about someone else’s refusal to see “the truth” makes you dig in a little harder on your position.

Be right, be independent, be free.

Sometimes, the point is to fail. In fact, the point is sometimes to maximize failure.

When you roll that car frame down the rail towards the brick wall with the checkered mannequins inside, you’re not hoping they survive! You’re trying very hard to make that crash as spectacular as possible. If the test car doesn’t hit the wall hard enough to destroy the dummies inside, the engineers don’t go “Hooray, safe on the first try!”

If that happened, they’d know they failed at failing.

This is different from just the acceptance that some failure is inevitable on the path to success, so you try your best to win but you mentally prepare yourself to be okay with losing a bit first. No, this goes beyond that. This is saying, “Failure is inevitable on the path to success, and you learn the most from failure, so I should maximize the disasters in order to maximize the learning.”

If you want to learn about something, often the best way is through disaster. The brilliance of the crash test isn’t in trying to avoid failure, it’s in harvesting it. Going from “hunter/gatherers” of failure to failure agriculture. No more free-range failures! This is about manufacturing them, so that you can maximize your learning.

Those crash tests aren’t just throwing cars at walls. Besides the obvious features keeping all humans safe, there are about a thousand cameras, sensors, and other features designed to scale up the learning process. No humans are harmed, and we gather incredible volumes of data. That’s what you’re after. Safe, high-information catastrophes.

People often tell me that I’m very good at interviews; I hope so, because I train people how to interview well. Some of what I know I learned from formal training in HR & recruiting, and some I learned from intense reading on the topic. But you want to know how I learned most of what I know?

I purposely would apply to roles that I either wasn’t that interested in or thought were real long shots, and I’d be weird on purpose. I’d try very unusual approaches to my conversations or my prep. I’d pull the kinds of stunts that you only see in comedy sketches. One time I actually responded to the “How would you describe yourself” question with “employed here.”

Those were my crash tests. They were “safe” environments because nothing was on the line – but I learned an incredible amount about what kinds of stunts were “too much” and which ones actually landed. I learned about conversational flow, rapport, and negotiation. And I even got offered a few surprising roles along the way.

Finding a safe way to break something is an incredible way to learn about it. Go beyond just the acceptance of a little failure, and create some more on purpose. You will be amazed at how quickly you learn when you crash.

A large gathering of my family happened this weekend. Parts of my extended family from thousands of miles away were in town, and the plan had been to get everyone into the pool.

It was pouring rain today. But other than that, it was perfect. Perfect temperature, no lightning or anything, just a marvelous day – except for all the water falling out of the sky.

But… so what? That pool was filled with people anyway. Everyone just decided they didn’t care, and why should they? You’re getting wet either way! The younger kids all wanted to stay in that pool all day, and they had a great time. In fact, in several ways, it was even better – no bugs, no sunburn, no hot concrete to walk across.

There’s a broader lesson here; isn’t there always? We so often mentally associate two or more things together, like “swimming” and “sunny day,” that we fail to see the opportunities to enjoy things we love even without the bundle. Sure, a sunny day might be a great day to go swimming. But that doesn’t mean you can only swim on sunny days.

You can do 99% of the stuff you like in less-than-ideal conditions and still have an absolute blast. You don’t need the perfect moment. Swimming in the rain is just as fun.

When I was younger, I loved catching lightning bugs (you might call them “fireflies,” but the common term ’round these parts is “lightning bugs”). Pretty much every kid does, if they live in an area where they emerge around dusk. They’re magical.

I was a fairly inquisitive kid, and one thing I knew about when I was around 8 or so was the relationship between a creature’s survival and the various ways that creature competed for that survival with the other creatures in its ecosystem. I knew that all living creatures had to have some evolutionary advantage in order to survive – it had to be fast, or strong, or poisonous, or armored, or camouflaged, or whatever.

So one day I asked my dad: “How are lightning bugs still around? They don’t sting or bite, they’re so slow that a human kid can catch them easily, and they actually advertise where they are. They seem like they’d be the easiest meal for any predator, ever. What keeps them alive?”

And my dad laughed. He said, “Go eat one.”

Apparently, the goo in their butts that makes them flash tastes absolutely horrible if you eat it. Our dog had eaten one when it was a puppy, and my dad had watched for the next 45 minutes as the dog hacked up the taste, chewed dirt, and even licked the sidewalk in an attempt to get the cloying, abominable taste out of its mouth.

So that was the lesson – some things are poisonous, or armored, or camouflaged, or speedy, or whatever as a way of defending what they have. So if you see a creature that has none of those things, then chances are good that the creature doesn’t have anything anyone wants.

That’s true in the world of humans, too. If you’ve ever looked at a deal on some product or service and thought “wow, that deal is so amazing, I can’t believe there’s even any in stock” – remember the lightning bugs.

If you’ve ever played a video game, you know that often there are “levels” to beat – and once you’ve done that, you’ve done it. Sure, you can play a favorite level again and again, but each time will be a little less exciting, a little less challenging. Thrill may eventually give way to nostalgia, but you’ll never get what you got the first time.

That’s not a knock against the design of the game! The level can have been wonderful, but once you’ve beaten it… you’ve beaten it. You’ve overcome the challenge, gotten the prize, gathered the story.

Keep that in mind in your life. Sometimes you feel like you want to move on from something, but this thought confuses you, because you can’t think of anything wrong with that thing. There doesn’t have to be. You simply might have gotten everything you’re going to get out of that level and it’s time to move onto the next.

People are far too dismissive of their own ambitions and desires.

Here is a truth: the best you are going to get is the best you can visualize. You won’t always get it! But you’ll never get better.

This means if you water down your own ideals, the best you can hope for is the watered-down version of your dream.

“Yeah, in a perfect world, I’d love to buy that cabin in the mountains, but…” Right there, in that statement, you killed that dream. Whatever comes after the “but” is what you’re going to get.

Dream of the perfect world! You won’t always get everything in it, but the dream is necessary to even attempt it. If you aren’t at least starting with your ideal visualization, no one else is going to come along and inflate it. Aim high – aim for the perfect world.

Sometimes there is value in making things very difficult for yourself.

There are two potential upsides to enduring a very difficult environment. If you manage to maximize both of those upsides, then the trade is usually worth it.

Upside #1: Personal development. If the difficulty of the environment is proportional to how much you’ll learn in that environment, that’s a powerful asset. For example, imagine you want to learn about the restaurant industry. You have two options for an entry-level role – one is a chill, somewhat slow mom-and-pop restaurant and the other is a high-intensity restaurant that’s part of an upscale chain. One job is harder than the other – perhaps gruelingly so. Both jobs will probably pay similar rates at entry level. But if you’ll genuinely learn 5x as much, 5x faster in the harder job, then that’s a major boon.

Upside #2: Reputation. If everyone knows that the environment you came from is extraordinarily difficult, then your successes there count for more than similar successes in an easier environment. If you came finished in first place in the 100m dash, then it matters whether we’re talking about the Olympics or your local neighborhood fun-run day. Going back to the restaurant example, working for Gordon Ramsey comes with it the well-known reputation that it’s a crucible, so success in that environment improves your reputation. But if your boss or environment isn’t well-known, then you might just be enduring all that for no real extra benefit.

So, add those two together. Is the environment one where the intensity of learning matches the intensity of necessary effort, and does everybody know it? If so, then it’s very likely worth the effort to succeed there in the long run. If one or the other isn’t true, then it might not be. And if neither is true – if it’s harder but you don’t learn more, and nobody on the outside has any concept of how hard it was there relative to other options – then it definitely isn’t worth it over your other options.

Putting yourself in a hard situation deliberately can have huge upsides. But make sure it does before you do it!