There is an art to not slamming doors.

Sometimes you leave! A room, a house, a building. Sometimes there are emotions that go with the departure, and sometimes the departure is necessary. But that doesn’t mean you have to do damage on the way out.

Because if you do, I promise you – it’ll be damage to you, not them.

My two youngest children got a little toy, a simple trinket – a little hoop and ball with a ramp leading up to the hoop. It made a little game: Try to roll the ball across the floor so it goes up the ramp and into the hoop. Simple.

My son tried it once, and missed. He then immediately started pulling out other toys – blocks and things – and built an extended barrier-and-ramp leading the hoop such that if he rolled the ball with sufficient force, he couldn’t miss.

This wasn’t cheating. For one, the task was “get the ball in the hoop.” Some may do that with manual dexterity, and others may do it with engineering. But it gets done. And second, it wasn’t cheating because the game is what we make it. Now he and his sister are competing to see who can build the more ridiculous Rube Goldberg contraption that still gets the ball in the hoop.

Decide what you want to do, and then do it the way you decide. Learn this, and life is yours.

People tend to over-consolidate. We all have needs, and those needs fall into different categories. We need money, we need nutrition, we need companionship, etc. What humans often do is consolidate their fulfillment of those needs into a single source.

For a huge number of people, all of their income comes from a single source, for example. They have one “job” and that’s the only thing that gives them money. Some people also try to use this one job to give them a sense of purpose, fulfillment, respect, status…

It’s too much.

We have social needs too. Too often people get married and then abandon basically all other relationships in their life, trying to make their spouse into their therapist, best friend, parental figure, confidant, training coach…

It’s too much.

Unbundle your life. If you have a need, find multiple sources of fulfillment. That creates stability and lets you get the best of everything you bring into your life. Sometimes putting things together makes sense, but far less often than we default to.

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” This is genuinely good advice, and worth remembering. At least for myself, I often forget it – I’m a dreamer, and I’ve gotten caught losing the sure thing because of the better longshot more than once in my life.

But that got me thinking. It’s good advice… for values 1 & 2. But I don’t think the formula can be extrapolated linearly.

Here’s what I mean: At certain values, increased upside is better than certainty because the certain option may not be enough no matter what.

Imagine you have until 5 PM today to buy a car at auction or it’s going to someone else, and you really want that car. You need 10,000 more to buy it. If someone offers you $5,000 cash or the ability to flip a coin for either $0 or $10,000, which would you take?

Normally – take the five grand! It’s the certain option, and the expected value of the coin flip is five grand anyway (the average between the two possible options). But in this case, $5k doesn’t get you what you actually want – the car – so you might as well take the only option where you might get it.

Also, the folksy truism assumes that it’s always X in the hand, 2X in the bush. But what if it were 5x? 10x? How many birds in the bush are worth one in the hand? Would you rather take a guaranteed thousand dollars or a coin flip for zero or a hundred thousand?

And here’s the caveat to the caveat: At a certain value, marginal utility diminishes. If you offered me a choice between [A: $1,000] or [B: Flip a coin for either $0 or $100,000], I’d absolutely choose B. The expected value is much higher (being $50,000), and I don’t *need* a thousand dollars to where the certainty is more important than the upside. But! If you offer me a choice between [A: $10,000,000] or [B: Flip a coin for either $0 or $1,000,000,000], I would choose A, hands down. Sure, the upside of B is way higher. But A – with no chance involved – would completely change my life. Ten million dollars would represent such a radically different change in my available resources that I’d be crazy to gamble that on the chance for more, even if it were a lot more.

And consider still that I’ve been talking about coin flips – 50/50 odds. But in real life, it could be 60/40, or 15/85, or whatever.

So here’s the deal, then: Whether or not a bird in the hand is worth some in the bush depends a lot on how badly you need one bird, how much good just one bird will do you, how many birds are in that bush, and how likely you are to catch them.

Start with the truism, sure. But consider carefully.

If you have people that mean a lot to you, wonderful. Those people may do things that are unique or interesting to them, and they’ll share them with you. Those activities will become part of the shape of your relationship to that person. It’s not just you and them; it’s all those things in between, too.

Someday, that person will leave this world. But when they do, those things don’t leave with them – they’re part of the world. They can feel unattached, like one half of a suspension bridge. So we look for other places to attach them.

We share them. We teach others those things, as a way of passing memories about the person we lost. And so that person continues to shape the world in which we live, forever changing how we live our lives, as we build their memory and their presence into our daily existence.

And then, that thing becomes something unique and interesting to us, that someone else perceives as a fundamental part of their relationship to us. We are important to them as they are important to us, and our traditions build a space around us. We make a warm and fun and interesting quilt of all these strange little quirks, and we can see the shapes of ghosts and angels in the pattern.

We will miss you, but you aren’t gone from us. How can you be, when you shape the very world we live in? We will add to that world and pass it on, and while we’re here we will play and sing and laugh and carry the joys that you taught us.

Why is it that when we’re young the prospect of sleeping anywhere but your own bed is so exciting?

As an adult, I don’t even like sleeping on the other side of my own bed. But my kids think sleeping on the couch in the living room is like a five-star vacation getaway.

Are kids just so excited to be away from what they perceive as a constraint – the routine, the location? Is sleeping on the floor in your big sister’s room just so novel that you’re excited about it, even though it’s objectively less comfortable?

Maybe that’s the lesson. Maybe novelty is harder to capture as an adult – enough experiences were “novel but bad” that we’ve adapted to a safe routine. Maybe it’s good to sleep on the floor now and then, just to remember that wherever you rest your head, you’re the one in charge.

When you successfully call your shot and it lands, talk about it. Being able to predict things – even the results of your own actions – is a difficult skill! It’s valuable to be able to be right about the future. It lets you win bets, for one. But it also helps you earn a positive reputation.

You don’t have to brag, necessarily. But there are lots of positive ways you can share the fact that you were right about something. You can use that knowledge to help others. And if you do that, you get the credit for being right in the first place.

You are your own first, best, and often last advocate. Don’t forget to put up the score when you win.

When something is hard to do, and you do it, admit that it was hard. Don’t force out a statement like “it was nothing” or undersell what you did.

For one, you deserve the rewards of your work. But even beyond that – don’t trap yourself.

Let’s say you sweat and grind and claw your way to success on something and it takes everything you had. Other people see the end result but not the effort, so you downplay the effort. But now they “want to see what you can really do when you put your whole back into it!”

Uh oh.

Look, if something was hard then you don’t get extra credit by pretending it wasn’t. The opposite is true, too – don’t make it seem harder than it was. But be honest with others – and with yourself – about exactly how hard it truly was.

It’ll be a little easier next time, after all.

When power over you is exercised with the same trappings for a long time, you start to fear and obey the trappings, wherever they appear.

If I put on a police uniform and start bossing you around, you’ll instinctively obey, even though I’m not a police officer. Statistically, it’ll be way more likely that I can get you to do all sorts of stuff you don’t want to do in that uniform. But I don’t even have to go that far – if I just dress and look like an off-duty cop, speak in an authoritative tone, that will work, too.

If someone’s job title is higher than yours, you’ll defer to them even if you don’t work for the same company. Even to your own detriment.

This behavior is natural. It’s understandable. We live in social hierarchies and we learn to size them up, and then we defer to them. It’s natural that you should be more instinctively deferential to someone who reminds you of your strict teacher, your strict parents, your strict boss.

It’s natural, and you must fight it.

Like many instincts, the purpose of this one is to keep you safe. But your instincts know that the safest route is the most cowardly, the most supplicant. The safest way to live is in deference to authority. So many of your instincts are tuned to that because a huge portion of your brain is just dedicated to pushing you in the direction of staying alive until tomorrow.

Staying alive is no way to live.

Fight the instincts that keep you safe.

It’s fine to not know something. But once you know, you need to act on it. You can’t ignore truth.

If you always feel sick, you aren’t at fault for not realizing that you’re lactose intolerant and that dairy products are making you ill. But once you do know, it’s on you. If you still drown your corn flakes in whole milk, you have no one to blame but yourself.

We seek information to make better decisions. What’s the point of information that you don’t use to inform better choices – to live a better life?

Not next month. Not next week. Now. You know the right thing – so do it.