When I was about 5 years old, I got my first Lego set. I absolutely loved them and collected them all the way up until my late teens when I moved out of my parents’ house. I didn’t really outgrow them, I just outgrew having the sort of life where it was feasible to own an enormous tub of plastic bits like that. So I gave them to some younger cousins (who were also probably around 5) so they’d have the joy I did.

By all accounts, they did have that joy – and added to it as well as the collection grew. Years go by, and my own kids have now been bitten by the Lego bug. They have a small collection and I add to it whenever they’ve done some particular thing worthy of reward. I mentioned this to the family, and get this – my aunt still has the giant collection I had gifted her sons!

They’re grown now, of course, and were more than happy to bequeath this hoard back to my household, returned after all these years to be enjoyed anew. My kids went berserk when they saw the haul. (I should have waited until Christmas; I could have given them nothing else and they’d have been thrilled.)

It was so fun to tumble back into a very specific kind of enormously enjoyable brain activity with my children, who were clearly experiencing exactly what I was. There’s just something about the ability to dump your imagination onto the floor in physical form, and then reshape it with your hands and eyes and a different part of your brain until it’s taken on a new life, and then let it back into your imagination in a wholly new way.

In many ways, it’s why I think digital creation tools are so wonderful for fostering artistic expression – it’s not the ease of use, per se. It’s the ease of unmaking, the infinitely resettable nature that frees you from all consequences of trying out new ideas over and over. You never waste anything – no clay is lost, no canvas ruined. No matter what you want to try, freedom.

Those opportunities aren’t everywhere, but they do exist. When you have that kind of freedom, trust me. Put your arms deep into that bucket, grab two handfuls of whatever you find, and go berserk.

How far can you walk into the woods?

Halfway. After that, you’re walking out.

Sometimes you don’t know how big the woods are, though. Doesn’t change the truth of it, but you don’t actually know when you’ve crossed that point. Only at the very end, when you’re out on the other side, do you get to know in retrospect where that halfway point was.

Now the real question is: does it feel different, to be walking in versus walking out?

Or are we always just walking through?

Imagine that you’re working on something in your garage, and a tool slips. You get a deep cut on your hand, so you wash it out and bandage it.

You don’t know what kind of problem you have. Not yet. You’ll find out the next day.

So the next day comes and you change the bandage. Now you’ll find out what kind of problem you have, and it will be one of two types.

In one scenario, you change the bandage and the wound looks better. It’s already starting to scab over and heal a bit, and it’s smaller than it was the day before. Your hand is still injured, but you’ve learned what kind of problem you have – the kind that will go away on its own in a little while.

In the other scenario, you change the bandage and the wound looks worse. It’s red, inflamed, and maybe starting to seep. The veins around it are red and the skin around it is black. It hurts to move and it’s warm to the touch; sure signs of infection. Now you’ve learned that you have the other kind of problem. This is the kind of problem that won’t go away on its own. This is the kind that will get worse and worse until it takes your arm or even kills you unless you take active steps to prevent it.

All problems are one of these two kinds. Often you need at least two data points to know, but just as often that’s all you need. Look at the same problem a few days apart. Did it get better? Will it?

If not, you need to act now. If waiting isn’t the solution, then waiting is your greatest enemy. Either time will solve the issue, or time is what’s killing you. You need to know – and once you do know, you can’t lie to yourself.

That’s the deepest cut.

We all have patterns we repeat in our lives, for better or worse. We’re most acutely aware of the bad cycles when we’re at their lowest points, of course. That’s when we want to break them, but also when we’re least capable of doing so.

Take a few moments today and ask yourself – what cycles are you still in, but on the high side? What will your current actions lead to? If it’s not something you want, then the time to break that cycle isn’t then. It’s now.

Recently I had a sizable improvement in my life in an area that I’d been working to improve for some time. My work paid off and I got the thing I was after. And almost immediately, I found myself thinking about the “next thing” instead of taking even a few moments to be satisfied.

I’m glad I caught myself, but it made me wonder how many other times I might not have. Look, there’s nothing wrong with some ambition. A drive to change and a desire to better both yourself and your circumstances is healthy. But you can get tied up in that desire to have, have, have. Make sure, if you want something, it’s because you’re choosing to aim your ambition in a healthy direction – not because you’ve been lassoed and are being dragged towards it by a desire you don’t control.

On your way somewhere else, don’t ever forget the profound effect you may have. Use your powers for good. Stop to help people you don’t know, and don’t be in so much of a rush to be anywhere that you don’t have time to do so. Stop in and say hi to people while you’re out and about. Make people feel good about who they are, but always encourage them to be even better, too. Don’t take anything too seriously, but get the job done.

Thanks for all the wisdom, Dad. Happy birthday. I miss you.

Some wise words:

1. If you feel like you hate everyone, eat something.
2. If you feel like everyone hates you, sleep.
3. If you feel like you hate yourself, take a shower.
4. If you feel like everyone hates everyone else, go outside.

Solve the easiest problems first, and most of the time that’s all it will take.

When it comes to leadership, there are plenty of bad choices you can make. Many actions you might take are pretty bad and can demoralize or disrupt an efficient team.

Being aware of those actions and choosing not to do them is important! But it’s half the battle – it’s passive leadership. For many people, it’s the easier part; after all, it just involves not doing something.

Then there are actions you need to take in order to be a good leader. Active Leadership is much harder, of course. It involves uncomfortable conversations with your coworkers, proactively building feedback into your own schedule, or making choices that affect an entire team that will get some pushback from individual members. Because these involve positive actions, they’re always going to be uncomfortable.

But all growth comes from discomfort – and as a leader, growing is an action you’ll always have to take.

Very few tools are good or evil. (I say “very few” because there are outliers – the guillotine might be all evil and penicillin is pretty much all good.) You hold them. You need a compass.

…no, the other kind. The moral kind.

A tool can’t define whether you’re good or evil. Valor and virtue don’t come from using certain objects or not using other ones. Discretion and application guide the soul.

I am both a parent and a people manager. One of my favorite little quirks of this combination is how often the same techniques and strategies are correct for both spheres. If you’re either (or both) of these things, then often you have to give feedback on behaviors and actions that don’t align with the goals of the organization – whether that’s effectively supplying a product or service to your customer base or leading healthy, happy adolescent lives.

How you give feedback is important, as is what kind of feedback you give and why you give it. But incredibly underrated in importance is when you give the feedback. There are three broad categories of “feedback opportunity,” and if you’re not using a combination of all three, you’re weakening the effectiveness of your feedback overall.

Opportunity #1: Spot Feedback. This is the feedback you give in direct, immediate response to a particular behavior. If your child colors on the wall or your direct report violates an important safety protocol, you want to address it right away. There is a ton of information out there about the best ways to do this (and like anything, it should be tailored to your circumstances), but I’m just going to make two points relating to the “when” of this one. One: If you only do this kind of feedback, it’s never going to be as effective, because this feedback needs to reinforce lessons taught in less stressful circumstances. Spot feedback is great as a reminder, but bad as an initial lesson. Two: If your spot feedback is always negative, it’s going to erode trust. Make sure you’re using spot feedback for positive reinforcement as often as for constructive criticism.

Opportunity #2: Scheduled Feedback. This is the feedback you give at regular intervals, whether it’s family dinner or your 1:1s. Again, I won’t talk about what, how, or why here – but the when is so important. This needs to be frequent enough to be meaningful; if you’re only doing this once a year it’s not going to create any lasting trust or behavioral change. And it has to be predictable and reliable – not based on whim. Whoever you’re giving the feedback to should know when to expect these meetings, and know that they’re going to happen regardless of circumstance. In other words, they shouldn’t confuse these with spot feedback.

Opportunity #3: Requested Feedback. This is the feedback that the person you’re guiding comes to you and requests. Often underused, this might be the most important kind – and again, the when is so important. When someone needs your feedback, make it your top priority. Don’t push it off with a comment like “We’ll talk about it at our next scheduled meeting” unless you absolutely can’t avoid it. The trust you build when you give someone the time they request is invaluable, and remember – people will act how you train them to act with your responses. If requests for your time are always met with a “no,” then people will stop requesting your time as they learn that you value your own schedule far more than theirs. Actively soliciting feedback is exactly what you want the people you guide to do, so don’t punish it when it happens.

That’s the checklist. Take a look through your past few weeks and for each person you guide, ask yourself: Did I give them feedback on the spot, positive and constructive, in roughly equal measure? Did I schedule enough time with them to give them feedback divorced from specific incidents, and did I stick to the schedule we agreed to? And did I say “yes” to their requests for feedback, with a reasonable response time?

If the answers to all of those were “yes,” then even if your how, why, or what needs work – you’re nailing the “when,” and that gets you a lot of the way there.