The smaller the scope, the more good you can do.

Big problems exist, at least in part, because of operational hurdles, coordination problems, and even certain parties being invested in the problem remaining. But no one is stopping you from picking up the trash at your local park or buying a meal for a person in need in your neighborhood.

Sometimes big, systemic overhauls are needed, and good people need to work together on them. But that’s often a lot of effort that could have just made a thousand smaller changes with almost no resistance, and those add up to a better life.

Don’t ignore the small stuff. If you want big changes to environmental policy but you won’t pick up a piece of litter and throw it out while you’re walking across a parking lot, then your values are aligned to the wrong scale. Good is good, no matter how small.

If you start pouring concrete before you’ve built a wooden frame to shape it, you’re going to end up with a big blob. Once the concrete starts pouring, it’s pretty much impossible to build the scaffolding; the concrete comes too fast and is too heavy.

Any new project or endeavor works like that, too. Let’s say, for example, that you have a baby. Imagine coming home from the hospital with the baby as the first step – and only then deciding to look into things like a crib, diapers, baby-proofing, etc. You can see what a disaster that would be! The baby is the pouring concrete; in order for it to pour into the shape you want (in this case, a happy home with a thriving and healthy child), you have to build the wooden frame first. You needed to already have a crib, diapers, formula, an accommodating schedule, family support, etc.

Whether it’s having a baby, taking on a new job, or anything at all that uses your resources, remember – by default, it will not only fill every inch of available space in your life, but it will do so with disastrous results. You prevent that by deciding in advance what shape you want that thing to take in your life, and then building a box for it in that shape.

So before you take on any new responsibility, take a little time and write out what shape you want it to be. Where are its clearly-defined borders? What does it look like inside those borders? Then do a little shopping and a little communicating, and build that frame. Because the concrete pours from day one, so anything past that is too late.

If you were to describe someone as “in shape” or “athletic,” you could be describing a number of different qualities. Maybe that person is very fast. Maybe they have great hand-eye coordination. Maybe they’re super strong, or an awesome jumper, or win a lot of wrestling matches. You wouldn’t necessarily assume they were all of those things, though.

Maybe because so much of that is assessable visually, we don’t tend to think that, by default, a very strong weight lifter is necessarily going to be a very fast runner or be able to accurately throw a ball. We recognize those as different skills, even if they fall under a broader category of “athleticism.”

We definitely don’t do that with intelligence, though. When it comes to brainpower, we tend to assume that if someone is “smart” then they’re smart on all possible metrics. If there is a quality that we associate with being smart, then we assume all smart people have that quality.

But “smart” can mean a lot of things, too! It can mean you have a good memory, or it can mean you’re good at puzzles, or it can mean you’re good at visualization, or it can mean you’re quick to understand concepts, etc. It absolutely doesn’t automatically mean all of those things.

In the scientific sense, there’s a lot about the brain we don’t know. But even in the everyday social sense, there’s a lot about how we treat intelligence that we get wrong. The important takeaway is this: if you observe someone with an unusual mental trait, don’t assume any others. That just wouldn’t be smart.

If you talk to enough people about the choices they’ve made in their lives, you’ll start to notice that there are two very different definitions of “easy” out there.

Some people use the word “easy” to mean “did not require much effort.”

And other people use the word “easy” to mean “did not require many choices.”

I’ve talked to people who took incredibly laborious, gruelingly difficult paths through life because – in their own words – it was “just easier” to take that path than to choose a different one.

Neither definition is wrong, of course. Labor is hard, but making a ton of decisions and plans can also be taxing. But you shouldn’t kid yourself that you’re doing these things because they’re easy – rather, you’re choosing one form of difficulty over another. Once you realize that, you may also realize that there’s an optimal balance between the two kinds that would work better than minimizing one value to maximize the other.

You must plan, and you must labor. How much of each is up to you. Find what works, not just what feels “easy” – because believe me, “Easy Street” is a long hard road indeed.

People constantly generate self-fulfilling prophecies. You do it whether you want to or not, so you might as well harness this for good.

If you meet someone that says “People, as a rule, are selfish jerks,” then that person will be proven right again and again. But they’re creating the conditions for this; their belief affects their demeanor, their demeanor affects their choices, and their choices affect how people interact with them – and even which people are around to do so. In other words, they’re callous and mean, so the people around them become that way, too.

If you say “People, as a rule, are kind and thoughtful,” then you’ll act accordingly. You’ll make it easy for people to be nice to you, and you’ll generally end up surrounding yourself with kind and thoughtful folks.

The world is full of people of all stripes, so no statement about them can be universal. But it can be true of your world if you make it so.

So, decide for yourself what you want to be true, and then act as if it was. Even if it only nudges the world in that direction, that’s better than the reverse.

When you’re truly done with a project or experience, are you satisfied or forlorn? Contented or hungry for more?

There is health in both. Balance is hard.

“I don’t know what they’ll write on my tombstone. But I’m glad you’re here.”

You can do anything you want. That isn’t the same as saying that your actions have no consequences. You own those consequences, but you own the actions, too. Don’t ever forget it.

The more versatile you keep your life, the more situations you can encounter with immediate adaptation. You can add and extract value more easily. Keep yourself modular.

Your goal isn’t to never make mistakes. If anything, you should probably make more than you make now; more people are too risk-averse than the reverse. No, your goal should be to keep the average cost of your mistakes low.

Especially relative to the average learning you get from a mistake, the cost of mistakes is more relevant than the frequency. If you can maintain an excellent cost:learning ratio for your mistakes, then the math alone explains why you should make more!

Consider: how much do you gain from learning something new? How much is more wisdom worth to you in the medium and long term? Whatever that number is, just make sure your mistakes cost less than that. Make your mistakes in an environment that makes them easy to recover from. Pad the edges and put on your helmet, and then go bonkers.

The version of you that exists three years from now will be far better off with this strategy than simply one of “make as few mistakes as possible.” Making this mistake would be very costly, so don’t.