I bet you think that the loss of one hand would be catastrophic. Imagine all the stuff you do with both of your hands! Lots of those things would be really hard.

But humans are adaptable. After all, if you had three hands life would be so much easier. Two isn’t necessarily the ideal number. But you figured it out!

All this is to say – your circumstances will change. Sometimes gradually, sometimes rapidly. But you’ll always adapt, one way or another. Keep your chin up.

If you have an apple cart in the market square and you’re not doing well, it’s natural to feel frustrated. What a lot of people do when they’re in that situation is make a list of everything they’re doing right, look at that list, and then say “I don’t understand, I’m doing everything right! Why isn’t anyone buying my apples?”

If you make a list of the things you’re doing right, you aren’t going to find problems. Obviously.

You might not even be doing anything wrong! But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do different things with more success. Maybe you have the best apples in the county and you’re a great salesperson with awesome prices. But maybe you live in a part of the world where everyone has apple trees in their yard and so they just don’t need yours. In other words, it might just be the market itself – and you’re in the wrong one.

The point is, listen to what the market tells you. Don’t be stubborn. If you’re trying to sell apples and no one is buying them, then you need to change something. You need to sell something else, or you need to sell somewhere else, or you need to change how you’re selling. But trying to justify how you “should” already be successful isn’t going to make you a dollar.

On the subject of the horrific fashion faux pas of wearing both suspenders and a belt with a suit, a tailor once told me: “Never trust a man who doesn’t trust his own belt.”

For some reason, I think about that moment quite frequently. It makes me smile.

It’s a decent lesson, though – while “better safe than sorry” is common wisdom, the truth is that doubling up on solutions is usually wasteful. An ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure, but a pound of prevention is definitely overkill.

There should only be two kinds of actions: ones you don’t take, and ones you take with great enthusiasm.

This isn’t me saying to only do things you want to do – that would be nice, but it’s not realistic. It’s me giving you the powerful advice that you should never do anything begrudgingly.

I’m of the mindset that I like to get the maximum benefit out of everything I do. And when you do something begrudgingly, you forego a lot of that benefit. Sometimes in life, you will simply have to do something. Pretty often, actually. And some people react to this truth with great petulance, kicking rocks and grumbling the whole way. They act as if the most important thing in the world is that everyone around them knows how much they don’t want to be doing this.

First, that’s silly because doing that takes significantly more mental and physical effort than just doing it and going on about your day. But second, and more importantly, that’s leaving half the reward on the table.

Whenever you do something, there’s always this great secondary benefit of scoring points with other people. Remember when you were an adolescent and your parents made you do the laundry or the dishes? Once that command came down, you were going to do that chore no matter what. It was set – your attitude wasn’t going to change the task at all.

Now imagine yourself back in that position. You have your assignment, and absolutely nothing about your attitude will change it. So now you have two options:

1. Do those dishes with the maximum amount of belligerence and sass. They will take longer, you will be in a worse mood, and your parents will treat your completion of the task as the bare minimum required and not feel any obligation to reward or even praise you. Or…
2. You can do those dishes with great cheer and enthusiasm. This takes no additional effort on your part – I’m not even suggesting you do extra work like also sweeping or anything. I’m saying just your attitude alone will make the task more fun and enjoyable, get it done faster, and your parents will be so utterly thrilled with you that they’ll probably buy you a car.

This is one of the great hacks of life: Training yourself to always approach tasks that you have to do as if you had, in fact, chosen to do them with great joy. It’s getting twice the reward from the same or less amount of effort, while also having more fun.

This is the easiest thing in the world to put into practice, today, if you know how to spot it. What’s something your partner or roommate harps on you to do more? Look, you know you’re eventually going to cave and do it – so don’t “cave and do it,” jump on it! Do it with enthusiasm, make a production out of it, and gift your actions to that person with some nice comments about how much their happiness means to you.

Assignment you don’t like at work? Well, unless you’re planning to quit, you’ve probably got to do it at some point. So do it with cheer! Might as well score some additional reputation as a go-getter and pleasant work colleague if you’re doing the same tasks anyway.

Almost everything you do is an exchange with somebody. If you’re putting in the same on your end either way, but you can get more in return by simply changing your attitude, that’s a superpower. In the same way you should generally brag more about what you’ve done, you should also smile more about what you’re doing. Both of those things squeeze more juice out of the same orange, in a way that benefits you and harms no one else. So don’t begrudge – be great!

In Haribo gummy bears, the green ones are strawberry.

Now, that’s obviously ridiculous, but that’s not the point of this post. The point is that my six-year-old daughter told me this fact, and I immediately expressed incredulous doubt. How could such an absurd thing be true? She was quite certain, however. My doubt persisted until she obtained a package of them and showed me that I was incorrect.

Now, here’s the thing about all this: I actually wasn’t certain. If I’d spent 2 seconds thinking about it, I’d have realized that I couldn’t tell you what any of the gummy bear flavor/color combos are. It just seemed silly to me that strawberry would be green. Meanwhile, I had every reason to believe my daughter:

1. She had volunteered the info, which clearly indicated a more recent expertise than I had.
2. She has, in general, more candy expertise than I do.
3. Most importantly, she has what I call “credible certainty.” I cannot recall a time she has ever expressed that level of certainty and been wrong.

Some people are over-certain. They express certainty when they shouldn’t (like I did!) with great frequency. When that happens, you shouldn’t take their certainty as evidence. But when someone (like my daughter) never expresses certainty unless she’s right, then you should absolutely update your thinking when that person feels correct enough to argue.

Lesson learned: I damaged my own “credible certainty” today. Fortunately, my daughter is as kind as she is smart, and forgave me.

Could you genuinely think about absolutely nothing for ten minutes?

I don’t think I could. I’ve tried and failed pretty quickly. I’ve always considered it an advantage that my mind is active enough that I’m never bored – I always have something I can think about that feels like a positive use of my mental time. But it’s hard to shut it off.

Not hard. Impossible.

What kind of mental abilities might I unlock if I could do that? Is it worth the effort to train myself to do it?

Or is this just one more thing to think about?

Today, my middle child, aged 6, penned and illustrated a graphic novel about a superhero cat fighting against a supervillain wolf. It was incredible; action-packed from cover to cover. My son, aged 5, is also rapidly increasing his literacy: he wrote “I see the little cat” without any prompting and understanding what the sentence meant. He wasn’t repeating a sentence he had seen, he actually assembled a complete and coherent sentence from words he knew.

Literacy is The Great Threshold. It’s the marker between being dependent on the direct attention and teaching of others for all your knowledge and being able to just go binge information on whatever you want. One of the greatest miracles in history is that someone actually managed to slip the printing press past all the tyrants and despots of the world. I wonder if they truly knew what they were unleashing.

Never forget, it’s some people’s job to overreact about things.

If your job is to look for signs of sharks at the beach, then you never get scolded for overreacting to the threat of sharks. If you spot a dark shape in the water and you blow your whistle to make everyone get out of the water, you’re commended for being diligent no matter how unlikely it was that the shadow was actually a shark. It doesn’t matter how much time you waste or fun you ruin. The only thing that matters is that it could have been a shark.

There’s not much that you, personally, can do about this. One thing you can do, though, is remember that there’s no shark. Don’t get swept up in their hysteria. Keep a cool head. It’s not much, but it’s something.

I find humans as a whole fascinating. When it comes to individual humans, the only ones I find interesting are the real ones.

What is a “real” human, you ask? Well, that’s different for everyone, because everyone has a different frame of reference, but the criteria are the same: real people exist in your real life.

When I think about “humanity,” I’m thinking about the emergent properties of how people will react en masse to things. When thinking about that, individual humans are rarely good data – each human is an anecdote, after all. So if a public figure, someone who exists to me only on a screen, does something weird then I’m rarely curious. They have their reasons, and I’m probably not going to figure them out. But more importantly, I don’t care – that person’s life doesn’t affect me, we don’t know each other, I can’t do anything to influence them. They aren’t real – to me.

Now, an individual in my actual life – the principal of my child’s school, a professional colleague, the owner of a store I like – these people are interesting to me, despite being individuals. I care about their lives, and their lives intertwine with me. I have the motivation to understand how they as individuals “work,” even if that provides no greater insight into humanity as a whole. The principal of my child’s school could be a total outlier on the Bell curves of many psychological profiles, but knowing their unique brain better might provide more benefit to me and my family than knowing more about the general cases.

A celebrity, political figure, or athlete doesn’t hold that same interest for me. And when I see other people feverishly discussing a person like that – someone who might as well be a fictional character in terms of actual impact on their lives – I often find myself feeling very distant from that part of humanity’s day-to-day.

The lesson, I think: strive to know your neighbors very well, and strive to know the eddies and currents of humanity as well as you need. But pay no attention to those men and women behind the curtain. If you must be on any side of gossip, better to be the person gossiped about than the person spilling the tea. At least then you’re probably doing something interesting.