My kids hauled in over sixteen pounds of candy tonight. Two of the three were injured, bleeding and all, during the night. None of them quit. They were on a mission, and that mission was accomplished.

Happy Halloween, everyone. May all your days be as joyous as kids with bleeding lips and knees holding up sacks of candy so bulging they can barely lift them.

We are social creatures. We highly value the esteem of our peers. One of the reasons for this is we evolved in an environment where “esteem of our peers” was the primary currency used to get pretty much everything else. We got better food, mates, living arrangements, etc. from being well-respected and highly regarded.

This is one of the reasons why our egos are so dangerous to us today. Imagine getting into a public argument with someone and defending your position in a heated manner. After, someone says to you “If you publicly apologize and admit you were wrong, I’ll give you a thousand dollars.” For many people that would genuinely be a difficult decision!

But why? The apology costs you nothing, and the argument probably wasn’t important. You don’t even have to mean it when you apologize! But our evolutionary wiring still screams at us that “status” is the most important thing, so we’re loathe to do anything to diminish it. That same evolutionary wiring hasn’t quite caught up to money, yet.

This is how you cheat at the status game. If you recognize that status isn’t actually the end goal and never was, but rather that status was always a form of currency used to get things we want, you can skip that part. You can recognize that a thousand dollars probably buys you much more of whatever you want than being right in an argument ever could.

Some version of this happens to you all the time. You get in an argument with a spouse, for example, and then you barricade yourself behind your position. What you actually want is a peaceful home, a pleasant mate, etc. You will get that stuff by just apologizing because you don’t live in a cave on the savannah. But the evolutionary wiring still thinks you do, and tries to convince you that the way to all your true goals is simply to be the ape with the most status.

Opt out, my friend. Abandon the status game, especially when it’s costing you something real to play it. Carve out your beautiful bubble and within it, be happy.

If you ever want to explain the rules of something to someone in a way that will make them stick, you absolutely cannot just start with the rules themselves.

The first thing you need to do is give the context. Then you can provide the goal. And only then can you start working through the rules.

I’ve seen middle-school principals welcome a whole new crop of fifth-graders by just listing rules, and even the kids that would actually care can’t even process what’s happening. If you start a conversation with “Whenever you’re moving between classes, you always need to take the right-most hallway,” you will get absolutely zero retention when you’re done.

Start with the context: “Welcome everyone! This school can get pretty crowded, especially when the bell rings and we’re changing classes. It’s easy to get lost and even easier for everyone to get in everyone else’s way. We don’t want it to turn into Black Friday at Wal-Mart in here, so we’re going to talk a bit about safe movement.”

Then give the goal: “We want to make sure, when the bell rings, that everyone can get where they need to go. That means sometimes you may have to do things that seem strange from the perspective of just going from Point A to Point B by yourself, but it’s designed to make sure we all get where we’re going safely and also keep things from becoming a huge mess. We have a few rules and if you follow them, everyone will be able to move around these halls.”

Now, you can start listing rules. You’ve explained why they exist and what they’re meant to do. You’ve gotten some buy-in and given people time to form a mental “box” in which to put those rules; something to connect them to.

Now they’ll stick.

Context – Goal – Rules. Follow that order and explaining things, especially to a large group of people, will be miraculously easier.

Here is an unfortunate truth that will nonetheless make your life better if you accept: Being “informed” about something takes a lot of work, and that work is generally not worth it.

Have you ever heard the phrase “know enough to be dangerous?” It refers to the fact that knowing a little bit about something often makes you more consistently wrong than just knowing nothing about something. I don’t know anything about nuclear reactors. If someone asked me a question about nuclear reactors, I would answer that I didn’t know. If someone asked me to make a decision about nuclear reactors, I would immediately demand that they find someone much more qualified. Therefore, I don’t pose much danger in that area.

I know a little about baseball. If you asked me a question about baseball, I’d try to answer it – with a good chance that I’d be wrong. If you asked me to stand in and be an umpire in a minor league game, there’s some chance you could convince me to do it, and I’d certainly foul it up (ha! baseball puns!). I’m aware of this, but that’s because I’m currently thinking about it. I might have missed it if I had been unprepared. That’s “knowing enough to be dangerous.” I know enough to think I know a lot when in reality I don’t know much at all.

Intellectually, you know this. If you think about any topic in which you’re a true expert, you know that it can be fun to talk to people who know nothing about that topic, but incredibly frustrating to talk to people who know “enough to be dangerous.” That level of knowledge is an essential step on the way to true expertise, but you have to maintain intellectual humility while you’re there. It’s also essential to recognize that the first step is only the first step, and only worth it if you plan to go further.

If I read one book on the Spanish-American War, that won’t make me an expert. In fact, it will probably make me more prone to mistakes regarding the Spanish-American War than if I hadn’t read any books on it, for the reasons I explained above. So there are only two good reasons to read such a book: Either I’m just curious and am reading it as entertainment while maintaining a firm grasp of my own lack of true knowledge, or because I intend to go much deeper and become truly informed about the topic.

Here is a bad reason to read just one book about the Spanish-American War: “I want to be informed about the Spanish-American war so that I can discuss it and have opinions on it and maybe even influence others about it, and I think reading that one book is sufficient for this.”

So if learning only a little bit about a topic and then staying there is worse than either learning a lot about a topic or learning nothing about a topic, what would you think about someone who knows only a little about a lot of topics?

That person is definitely not “informed” in any sense of the word. That person is just systematically wrong about a lot of stuff. They don’t even know it.

But what I’m describing is the median person who just casually consumes news. It’s bad enough if they’re reading a range of topics in actual news sources; it’s much worse if they’re getting this “news” from social media or things like that. It’s better to have no opinion on most topics than to have bad opinions on most topics.

So if you spend an hour every day (or more!) reading the news, paying attention to trending stories on social media, or other such activities – all you’re doing is training yourself to be wrong on a wider range of topics. The people who produce those things aren’t any better (journalists aren’t experts in those topics either, after all), and they’re passing their error, bias, and noise onto you.

Actually becoming an expert on a topic is hard. Listen to me: Actually becoming an expert on a topic is hard. If you have not worked hard, then you are not an expert. And if you aren’t an expert, then you’re probably wrong about a lot of stuff. You should not consider “a little knowledge” useful for absolutely anything except gaining more knowledge. Reading that one book on the Spanish-American War is a great start to becoming an expert, but it doesn’t qualify me to do anything else.

Now again, remember that it’s also okay to just read a book on the Spanish-American War because I want to, because I find it interesting. There’s no purity test there, and if you just genuinely like watching the news because you find it entertaining, go you. But I’ve never met anyone like that. The people I know who relentlessly consume “pop news” do it because they think it’s making them smarter, more informed, and more justified in having strong opinions on things. I’ve never met anyone who watched two weeks of news coverage on a political event and then calmly said “Well, I don’t actually know enough about the details of this event to form a strong opinion.” Could you even imagine that?

Whatever topics you find important enough to become an expert in will never be covered accurately and in sufficient detail by “news.” In fact, if you’re an expert in something and the news happens to cover a story relating to that topic, you will inevitably laugh at how wrong they got it; that’s the nature of “enough to be dangerous.” So don’t fall into that yourself. Be an expert on a few things, and be humbly and nobly ignorant on the rest. Live a happy life.

There’s a lot of money to be made telling losers what they want to hear. If you ever hear a public figure of any kind telling you something just oh so comforting about how the problems you’re currently facing aren’t your fault and you shouldn’t have to take responsibility for them… run.

Those people don’t want to help you. They want to drag you screaming into the rocks so they can loot your corpse. They want you to empty your vaults of money and attention, heaping it all onto them. They tell you that you you can’t solve your problems so you shouldn’t try, but that’s okay because they aren’t your fault anyway, and what you should do instead is just wallow and make the wallowing a little easier by voting/subscribing/buying in whatever patterns they tell you.

Look, I’m not trying to be deliberately brutal. Not every single bad thing in your life is your direct fault, obviously. But it’s all your responsibility, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to shake you down. It’s a grift. No one ever improved their lot in life by listening to people tell them that they have no agency, that they’re simply victims of forces they can’t possibly understand or control – only blindly and impotently hate.

Don’t fall for it. Keep your rudder straight and tie yourself to the mast if you have to. Only go toward hope and life, not despair and death.

The signal-to-noise ratio is real. If you want to hide information, the secret isn’t to… well, hide it. The secret is to bury it. Make the information you want to keep hidden part of a flood of information so banal and uninteresting that no human mind can penetrate it.

You can even do this by accident, that’s how effective it is. Want someone to miss an important update from you? Easy, just send them ten updates a day, and call all of them important. If The Boy Who Cried Wolf was around today, he’d mark every email “urgent.”

Planes are statistically the safest way to travel, by a really absurd margin. Despite this, I can find an example of a plane crash with ease. I can even find documentation of a really horrific plane crash, with gruesome pictures and stuff.

It shouldn’t really need to be said, but I’m going to say it here anyway (mostly for the purposes of linking to this later): responding to a claim of “X is very rare” with an example of X is not a good argument.

I might say “Flying is very safe,” and you might argue by showing me horrific pictures of a plane crash while smirking and saying “Oh, so this looks ‘safe’ to you?” If you do that, you’re wrong and not very bright.

Many people who argue this way are simply dumb, but some of them are manipulative. For example, they might know that flying is very safe, but maybe they run a bus company and they have strong incentive to trick people into shifting their travel miles from planes to buses as much as possible. That person absolutely loves it when a plane crashes, because they know that even though this argument is wrong, it sometimes works.

(I’m not saying everyone who works for a bus company relishes plane crashes, obviously. There are plenty of reasons to base your travel plans on things other than maximum safety, such as cost or convenience, so buses are fine. Just using that as an example.)

So whenever you make a statistical claim and someone responds with a single example of the statistical outlier, do a quick check: are they just dumb, or are they trying to push an agenda?

People who are correct don’t always make good arguments (and it’s a shame when they don’t). But people who are incorrect almost always make bad arguments, because there are precious few good arguments for incorrect positions.

If you want to be right more often, one of the first steps you can take is not to use bad arguments for any position. If you refuse to use bad arguments and force yourself to only use good ones, you’ll automatically exclude a lot of incorrect positions from your life.

I learned of a really fantastic concept from a running coach I was speaking to recently – the idea of a “comfort lap.” The concept is this: if you’re running laps, you can alternate between laps where you really push yourself to as hard as you can and laps where you take a leisurely jog.

You’ve probably heard the concept of your “comfort zone,” a metaphor for the situations and lifestyles where you aren’t challenging yourself. If you’re in your “comfort zone” then you’re in very familiar territory, taking no risks, etc. When you “step out of your comfort zone,” you’re doing something more dangerous, something less familiar. You’re taking those risks in order to grow.

As evidenced by that language, we tend to think of “comfort” as also stationary. Your “comfort zone” is a place, a location – a static location. If you’re in your comfort zone, you aren’t doing anything, or so the thinking goes.

But it doesn’t have to be! You can be making forward progress and engaging in something meaningful even if you aren’t pushing yourself to the limit. That’s why I love the concept of the “comfort lap.” You aren’t stopping. You’re just changing your pace to emphasize comfort and sustainability over high-cost growth. It’s good to alternate between those, and it’s even better if you can do it without always needing to stop entirely.

Your life shouldn’t be a series of jerking transitions between maximum energy expenditure and total sloth. That even pace should be a large percentage, even the majority. Some times of total sloth are fine, just as some times of enormous effort are healthy. If you run as fast as you can for as long as you can before collapsing, then stay collapsed on the ground until you can get back up and immediately run as fast as you can for as long as you can again on repeat, you won’t go nearly as far as you will if most of the time, you jog.

If you can deliver bad news effectively, it’s a superpower. It can command respect, advance careers, and solidify friendships. Very few people do it well, which is why it’s such an awesome skill when developed and deployed correctly.

Here are the keys:

1. Bad news needs to be blameless. The point of giving the bad news is to get people to change their behavior, not just to bum them out. They’re less likely to change their behavior if they’re on the defensive right away. So keep the bad news to the facts of the present, not who caused the current situation. Don’t lead with, “The bad news is that because Jim botched the sales meeting, our main client is canceling their contract.” Even if it’s true, it isn’t helpful.
2. Always have a preliminary “either/or” solution to suggest. If you’re telling people the building is on fire, then you also want to package it with “Either we do X to put the fire out now, or we do Y to begin the building evacuation.” Remember, you’re trying to avert disaster, not just predict it. If you’re identifying problems just because “someone should do something about it,” remember that the superpower here is being the someone.
3. Treat the bad news as a project to be worked on together. Lead the team. Step up. If you treat it like it won’t be a disaster for you personally, then other people will respond with the same attitude and help solve it. If you treat the bad news like you’re giving it away and then washing your hands of the whole affair, then everyone else will treat the problem like a hot potato and it won’t get solved before it actually is a disaster.
4. Coming to the table with a solution is about being proactive and confident; it doesn’t mean you have to dig your heels in and demand that your specific plan be followed. The table is presumably full of smart people, and this process is about getting those people to engage their talents with you. If it works, then other people will contribute a lot. Thank them!

If you nail those steps, then you won’t just be the messenger who gets the blame for being the one to call out the obvious. You’ll be respected for your ability to solve problems and your candor in approaching them. Most people are very hesitant to do this, for a whole host of reasons. And anything most people won’t do is a gold mine if you will.

Most of the best stuff in your life will happen when you’re not safe. No one ever felt completely in control of their life the first time they had a child, or visited a totally unexplored location, or built the best invention of their life.

All the best stuff is over that line on the map. Make sure you’re stepping over it with some regularity. That also means making it a point to regularly prepare for danger – be sharp, be in shape, be equipped. Conduct your life in such a way that you’re okay with a little danger. Or a lot.