Whenever something bad happens to us, it’s natural to examine it. To pick the event apart, dissect the circumstances, dwell on the implications. But there are two ways to do this, and only one is healthy.

People who examine their failures fall into one of two camps: people who are looking to change the past, and people who are looking to change the future.

Some people examine their failures down to the molecule, but they’re not looking for wisdom. They’re looking for some way to make the failure not a failure. They want to find some piece of evidence, some context, or some hidden agenda that changes the nature of the disaster from one where they fell short to one where it wasn’t their fault. They’re trying to change the past.

The other camp is full of people who examine their failures trying to change their future. They’re not looking to alter what happened in the past, they’re trying to make sure it never happens again. They accept what happened as the first step to understanding why it happened, and understanding why can lead them to doing better in the future.

Everything you’ve ever done happened in the past, and it’s natural to draw on experiences. So you’ll “think about the past” with some frequency. Are you doing it to learn from it, to try to change your future? Or are you trying, against all hope and reason, to hew a new shape from stone already cast?

You can’t edit the history books. But you can read them, and write the ones yet to come.

People back themselves into corners all the time. They don’t want to be there, but they’ve painted themselves into a situation where getting out would cost them more in social capital than they want to spend. This can be a problem for you, if you’re trying to get something from someone who’s done that to themselves – and if that person has painted themselves into a corner that prevents you from getting it.

Want an example? Let’s say you have a co-worker who’s taken on a big project that is upstream from your work. That project is required for you to do your next major project, but it rapidly becomes apparent that this co-worker has bitten off more than they can chew. They talked a big game about being able to do the work, but now it’s behind schedule and impacting you.

Think about what this person has done. They’ve put themselves into a situation where asking for help – even though it’s the sensible thing to do – will make them lose social capital. They’ll look bad in front of their peers. That alone will make them act irrationally; they might scoff at the idea of help and make excuses, they might start shifting blame, all sorts of things can happen. Even if all you want to do is genuinely help, your offer of assistance is as likely to get lashed out at as accepted.

So what to do? You need to offer this person a “social escape hatch.” You need to engineer the situation a little in such a way that allows them to accept the help without losing face.

If they can’t admit that they need help, then don’t offer help – ask for it. Tell them you want to learn how to do projects like that, and ask if you can “ride along” with them. Now you’ll be helping anyway, but they save face. Or maybe let them know you’re struggling with a different project, and maybe it would make sense to combine efforts and work on both together.

There are many options – too many to discuss in one post. But once you understand the core idea, it’s easier to navigate.

Everyone has their personal needs, and if you try to wrestle with someone’s ego, you’ll almost always lose. But the ego will happily yield to practical reality if it doesn’t have to get hurt in the process. So figure out how to let the ego out the back door and you can get anything you want.

My father had a saying he employed whenever I was looking for something and failed to find it, despite it being right under my nose or otherwise obvious: “If it was a snake, it would’ve bit ya.”

My father had a lot of sayings.

This is a good one; it’s apt and funny without being mean. I use it with my own kids and it gets a laugh (or at least a smiling eye-roll).

We are shaped and we shape. Everything from enormous values and culture to the tiny little jokes we make. We look for these things, but they’re right in front of us.

Humans will complain. It’s in our nature. From birth, we learn that we should pretty much always at least attempt to manipulate our surroundings through language because sometimes it results in us getting a cookie. As long as we don’t overdo it, there’s rarely a negative consequence for complaining – so we do it all the time.

The upshot of this is that whether or not someone complains isn’t a good measure of their well-being, and whether or not people as a whole complain a lot isn’t a good measure of society’s well-being. If an individual or a group is doing amazingly, they’ll still gripe.

What is a good measure of a person or group’s overall prosperity is the content of those complaints.

If a person’s complaint is that they might not have enough food to keep their kids from dying of starvation this week – that person has a genuinely rough life! If a group’s complaint is that a portion of their population is being carried off by wolves in the night, that group is in a tough spot!

But if a person’s complaint is that their iced cappuccino didn’t come with as much whipped cream as they normally get or a group’s complaint is that their grocery store has too many options for hummus so it’s hard to choose, then hey, guess what? Their life is amazing!

If anything, the number of complaints usually runs counter to prosperity. The better off you are, the more stuff is in your life – so the more little things you could find to complain about if you want to. But people will front-load the worst complaints they can; whatever someone says first is usually the worst thing in their mind. So if someone’s worst thing is that the climate-control system in their house required minor repairs, then congratulate them! Their life is good!

The news is filled with complaints, and every day they grow more absurd. There are problems, and I won’t pretend that there aren’t. But it’s also absurd to pretend that things aren’t wildly, amazingly better than they used to be, and getting better all the time. You can tell just from what people complain about.

There is a popular YouTube celebrity who often makes videos of himself doing charitable or generous things for underprivileged people. The accusation that often gets levied against him is that he’s “just doing these things for clout.” In other words, he’s only doing these good deeds because he can make popular videos about them, increasing his own wealth and status in the process.

Um… good?

People have all sorts of reasons to do the things they do, and not all of them are purely altruistic. In fact, most of them aren’t. But that doesn’t mean that good doesn’t come from those acts.

This goes beyond just charity work in the world, too – it extends to all actions. Maybe you’re trying to work out solely to make it easier for you to pick up singles at the local bar. But in the process, you get healthier and live a longer life where you spend time with your family. It’s okay that your original motivations weren’t so high-minded; good came of it.

Don’t judge others’ motivations too harshly. Don’t judge your own too harshly, either. The world turns on the deeds that get done, not the thoughts that put them there.

I used to snack, a lot. As a younger man I basically always had some kind of food nearby, eschewing larger meals in favor of a constant stream of smaller bites.

First, that’s not very healthy so I’m glad my habits have changed. But they didn’t just change out of a desire for healthier eating, they changed because that no longer appeals to me. Smaller snacks hold very little interest for me; if I eat at all, I prefer a hearty meal. Most days I eat one large meal and that’ll be it for the day.

It’s interesting how that preference translates in other areas of my life. I prefer singular, more meaningful experiences over a collection of smaller ones.

Maybe that’s just natural – and maybe the pattern itself is healthy. At the beginning of your life, it’s good to sample as much as you can. Gather information, learn what you like. As you move on, you get a better sense of what those things are, and you can enjoy them more deeply. Microcosms of this exist any time you pick up a new interest, learn a new hobby, move to a new city.

Sometimes we think we need the constant stream of new experiences. To an extent, you do! Don’t ever let your life have no little bites. But you can slow it down and replace some of that with the heartier meals of life. Enjoy them that much more deeply.

Things go wrong sometimes. You make a mistake, something breaks, a plan falls through. It’s life! Most of the time, you have a Plan B; even if you didn’t have one in advance, one usually presents itself quickly. Need to go to work but you left your headlights on all night so now your battery is dead? Well, you can call a friend, take the bus, summon an Uber, etc.

But let’s say the backup plans have problems, too. No Ubers near you, the bus doesn’t run this way for another hour, and none of your friends are available. I’ll bet as you’re picturing this you can imagine the frustration and how easy it would be to get irritated at the stupid bus company, the lousy rideshare service, or your good-for-nothing “friends.”

People do this all the time. They get mad at the backups. But take a deep breath – the original problem was your fault!

It wasn’t the bus company, Uber driver, or your friends that forgot to put gas in your car. That was you. Frustration is normal, but don’t direct it at people who aren’t at fault for your main problem. That’s not only not helpful, it’s unjust. And it drives away the very people who might be able to help you next time you have a problem.

And they can drive away. Unlike you, they have gas in their car.

My son, who is recently five, just took his first solo trip to the park. Not with his big sisters or with me, just all by himself.

You will take tens of thousands of “first steps” in your life. You will walk places you’ve never walked before. You will walk in a new town, then a new state, then a new country. You might someday walk on a new planet. You will set foot on an airplane for the first time, or you will walk into your first job.

You will take your first steps down the aisle, perhaps. Or you will take your first steps toward the casket of a loved one.

You will march toward a battle for the first time, or you will take your first steps on a dance floor. Your life will be so full of first steps that you couldn’t count them all.

Each step takes you farther than you’ve ever gone before. Each step adds to the total number of steps you’ve taken, and no step detracts. The journey is always additive, the progress always forward.

When you are very lucky, you will be there for the first steps of someone else. Cherish those moments, and cheer for them. This is how we go. This is how we grow.

When I was an adolescent, I did a lot of theater, drama club, things like that. I loved the stage. For the most part, the stage loved me, too – it was easy to be there. I didn’t realize until later what a huge inherent advantage I had as a boy in that space.

If you look at any group of 13-year-old budding thespians, you’re looking at probably 90% girls or more. A handful of boys, tops. This meant, among other things, that it was really easy to audition and get great parts. I’m not a phenomenal actor and can’t sing at all, but I was a rare commodity.

I didn’t realize this was a viable, repeatable tactic at the time, but the lesson is clear now. Go where you’re the rare commodity.

No matter what you want to do, there is some space where that thing is in short supply. And if there isn’t, you can learn what is. Look around for weaknesses, gaps, shortages – and become the thing they need.

There are lots of unemployed people in the US, but there are also lots of open jobs. Why is that? Because some people will always try to sell into a crowded market. It’s human nature. You learned to make gadgets but everyone needs gizmos, but you like making gadgets. Your choice is to either learn to love making gizmos instead, or to keep making gadgets and complaining about the tough gadget market.

Survival is about shifting with the tide. The world is rarely shaped around your specific needs and wants, but you can learn to love lots of things. And few things feel as good as being needed.

Just because something is subjective doesn’t mean that you can’t be wrong about it.

Many things – even important things! – are subjective and hard to define within tight edges. Sometimes people exploit this fact in order to pull some rhetorical trickery. If you can’t define something too exactly, that leaves an opening for people to define it however they want, even to an absurd degree.

Let’s take an example – bullying. Bullying is bad, but what bullying is can be hard to exactly pin down. One of the reasons bullying can be hard to deal with in places like school is because sensitivity varies across individuals, intent is hard to directly observe, and many instances of it can devolve into “he said/she said” arguments with no clear objective result.

So if all that is true, doesn’t that mean that bullying is always whatever the victim says it is?

No, of course not.

Yes, bullying is subjective, but some things are clearly not bullying. If one student claims “She’s bullying me because she did her book report on a book I hate just so I’d have to listen to it,” then that student is over-defining bullying so loosely that it loses any influence as a term. That doesn’t mean bullying isn’t real, and it doesn’t even necessarily mean the student in question isn’t being bullied. But some things fall outside the range of reasonable subjective opinions.

So be wary about people pulling this trick. It’s an easy crack to slip through. Taking any negative but subjective topic and re-defining it so that it always conveniently wraps around the person speaking is an easy way to create a false moral high ground. Don’t fall for it – don’t be bullied.