There is always some project or another to do. I’m a father and a homeowner, which pretty much means my To-Do list exists until the end of my life.

Every December, that list gets pretty backed up. The holidays demand my attention in other directions and the project list starts to jam. I’ve had unopened boxes and unfinished projects laying around for a while.

And then I was given an unexpected gift of a nice piece of furniture by a friend. It had to go somewhere, which meant something had to move. But in order for that to move, this had to get cleaned. And if I cleaned that, I’m already adjacent to assembling this, and once I assemble this I need somewhere to put it, so I’ll clear off that…

Before I knew it, the domino effect had knocked a half-dozen items off of my major project list. I’d had a positive cascade, each success invigorating me and making the next project both fun and – more importantly – obvious. An easy path emerged and all it took was some music and I ran it.

Sometimes all you need to get started is one thing you can’t ignore or postpone. One positive event can break through the logjam and start all the pieces moving again.

A promise is a request for faith. A promise is a commitment to the future, almost always in place of an act in the present. When you make a promise to someone, you’re asking for their faith that you’ll do in the future what you aren’t doing now, for whatever reason.

Sometimes you have a good reason for this, but be honest about what it is. And don’t make promises to yourself. You’ll act or you won’t, but you don’t need to convince anyone. You just need to do what you need to do. Promises don’t factor in. If you start treating yourself like someone you can fool, you’ve lost.

Long days, short life. Short days, long life.

Don’t try to stretch every day to its breaking point. Fill it, put a bow on it, and move on.

Hollow bricks build a shoddy home.

As the saying goes, “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.” That’s wise… most of the time. But every once in a while an exception slips through because everyone thinks that way.

I took my family recently to a busy event at a small location. Normally no more than a few people at a time would be at this place, but because of the special event, there were maybe ten times the normal number. The already limited parking was overwhelmed and there wasn’t a spot to be had for several blocks around the place. My intention was to drop my family off out front and then go find a spot myself and walk (the classic Dad maneuver).

Instead, I found one open spot directly in front of the building and parked there.

My oldest daughter was shocked. We had seen people drive right past that spot in front of us and then turn down a side street, obviously also looking to park and go to this event. Why had the spot remained open?

But one quick look and I knew why. Because we’re used to a spot directly in front of an establishment to be “reserved” in some way – a loading zone, a handicapped parking spot, something like that. And if such a spot had no cars in it, that surely must be why, right? A free spot right in front is simply “too good to be true.” Everyone thinks that way, so everyone passes that spot right by.

I pulled in. (And after I had pulled in, I checked to make sure I hadn’t missed any signs, but nope – just a normal spot on the street.)

The “efficient market hypothesis” is an economic term that’s basically summarized as “there are no $20 bills on the sidewalk.” The idea is that if there are any free & easy gains, someone will have already grabbed them. There are no $20 bills on the sidewalk because someone will have already picked them up.

That’s generally true – but that “someone” could still, every once in a while, be you. So if you do see a $20 bill on the sidewalk (or a suspiciously convenient parking space), don’t cheat yourself out of it just because you doubt the good fortune. You can always check for signs once you’re parked.

One of the things I frequently advocate for is making more mistakes. This advice, like most of the advice I give, is inward-facing; this is, after all, a blog about personal development and self-improvement more than anything else. You should make more mistakes because it’s better for you to do so – your general level of output for whatever you’re trying to accomplish, from learning the piano to finding true love, will be higher if you make (and learn from) mistakes instead of being so risk-averse you never make any.

But today, we’re going to talk a little bit about other people’s mistakes. And how you should react to them. It’s going to be the exact same advice, just viewed from the outside. So let me tell you the story of two delivery drivers, Amy and Jane.

Amy and Jane both work for the same delivery company, but Amy is far more profitable. She’s constantly improving on her job – everything from how she packs her vehicles to the routes she takes around the city. She’s always trying to do better. She’s worth $10K in profit per month to the company. Jane is profitable too, but only to the tune of $5K per month; she’s a bit more conservative in her approach and doesn’t step out of her comfort zone much.

One day, Amy makes a mistake at work. She damages an item as part of her delivery, and the customer who receives it files the standard form that entitles them to have the delivery company replace it at their cost. This is a $100 mistake, though it wasn’t because of any special carelessness on Amy’s part. It was just a thing that happens because humans are fallible, though Amy’s boss notices that Amy’s truck isn’t packed according to the standard method and calls Amy into his office.

In his office, the manager tells Amy that he’ll be deducting the $100 from Amy’s paycheck. It was, after all, her mistake.

Amy considers this in silence for a moment. While the mistake wasn’t due to carelessness, there is some chance that her innovative packing techniques led to the damage. She takes responsibility and says so: “Okay, boss, I got it. You can take the $100 out of my last paycheck. I quit.”

The boss is flabbergasted. He wants to know why Amy is quitting over something so small.

“That’s the point,” she says. “I’m very profitable. In fact, I’m more profitable than any other delivery driver here, though we all get paid the same amount. I’m more profitable because I’ve chosen to improve my skill by making mistakes; sometimes I had to work later to finish my deliveries because I tried a route that wasn’t quicker. Sometimes I had to work harder to repack my truck several times because the first configuration I tried didn’t improve my storage capacity. But I owned those mistakes and finished my route. And as a result, I got better and better until now I can deliver twice as much as anyone else in here. On average, a driver like Jane makes five thousand in profit for you a month, while I make ten thousand. You could have just been content to let me make you nine thousand, nine hundred in profit and been happy that I’m such a great delivery driver. But instead, you’re trying to put the cost of this mistake back on me without ever sharing with me the benefit of those mistakes. So now I’m taking that benefit with me when I go. I could work for a competitor, start my own delivery service, or even just find a new industry to learn. And you just paid thousands of dollars a month for a hundred-dollar bill.”

The lesson is a good one – mistakes aren’t just a cost of doing business. They’re what makes the business run in the first place. Often in a workplace you can hear a water-cooler complaint like ‘Jensen makes a ton of mistakes, but because he’s number one in sales they let him get away with it.’ The complainer has missed the point. ‘Jensen’ isn’t being given special treatment because of his high performance. Jensen’s manager just understands that the occasional mistake is an essential part of what makes that performance excellent in the first place. If you bus three times as many tables as everyone else, statistically you’ll break more plates. Obviously, you want to keep the average down, but if you take every plate out of their paychecks you’re just going to end up with a slow, risk-averse bus staff.

Everyone you interact with is going to make mistakes sometimes. Punishing people for individual mistakes is one of the worst things you can do. If you’re a parent, a spouse, a manager, a coach – always look at the net output of whatever you’re evaluating. Don’t make someone else’s mistake yours.

Behaviors you want to change need to be understood and addressed in the context of their past, present, and future.

Each incidence of a behavior you don’t like has a past cause. Something led to that behavior, and you won’t be able to change that behavior by maintaining the same causal chain and then hoping to make a sudden swerve at the last minute. If every time you go into the casino you gamble away your paycheck, then you need to not go into the casino in the first place. Of course, going into the casino is a behavior too – so what leads to it? Go back as far as you need to in order to find a behavior you’re strong enough to change.

In the present, you need an emergency triage system. Something more severe – something to realign your mind if you’ve slipped. A replacement behavior. This is why “sponsors” are effective for people struggling with addiction: Calling a trusted person is a good replacement behavior.

And you need to be able to recognize the future for what it is – a series of effects of the choices you make now. Bad decisions are often coupled with short-sightedness; you behave badly now because you aren’t clear about where your actions are leading. If you can’t see the consequences in the long term, it’s easier to choose poorly today.

When you look at all of these things in one great causal chain, it becomes easier to begin to alter its trajectory.

May your days be merry and bright, my friends.

I’ve had one of the best Christmas seasons ever. Joy with my family, again and again. Moments remembered and experienced and shared. Stories told.

May your joy be never-ending, my friends.

When I was in kindergarten, our assignment in art class on some particular day was to “draw something beautiful.” Pretty standard stuff for that age. I drew (to the best of my meager ability) an angel.

This wouldn’t be notable in any way except for the fact that I got in some trouble for it. The teachers were touchy about religious stuff in school, and suggested that I draw something else. I was pretty stubborn and didn’t want to draw something else, and apparently, I put up enough of a stink about it that my father got called.

He came to the school for the ensuing parent-teacher conference and made it quite clear that he was not in agreement with the school’s position. The teachers said they were worried about making other kids uncomfortable if they either weren’t religious or maybe had other religious beliefs, which my father – rightly – pointed out was absolutely absurd. One kid drawing an angel for himself wasn’t an affront to any other five-year-old’s beliefs. Since I couldn’t name a single other thing anyone else drew, it was absurd to imagine that anyone else would even know what I’d scrawled on a piece of paper unless someone raised a whole stink about it.

The point my father was making, which was correct then and is correct now, is that your own self-expression is never impolite. No one else is forced to even look at your stuff, let alone grapple with the deeper implications of it. There is plenty out there that can be considered taboo; stuff you don’t throw at others unless they’ve agreed to step into that sphere with you. But taboo cannot exist between you and the page.

When you draw something, write something, even say something in no one’s company but your own, that’s nothing more than an external hard drive to your mind. It’s no one’s business, even if you’re doing it somewhere that someone else could conceivably be exposed to it. It still isn’t an attack, and is never harmful to others.

There was this joke that went around when I was younger (maybe it still goes around, who knows) about a person who goes to McDonalds and orders this big meal, like a Big Mac, fries, apple pie, chicken nuggets, “…and a Diet Coke.” The joke is that ha ha, this person is suddenly concerned about health when it comes to the drink, after ordering all that garbage? Ha ha ha.

Even back then, I thought the joke was silly. Like sure, maybe Big Macs aren’t the healthiest thing in the world. But you know what’s worse for you than a Big Mac and a Diet Coke? A Big Mac and a regular Coke.

I worked out today. I also ate a cookie. And you could laugh and say “Why bother working out if you’re just going to eat a cookie?” Because look, I was going to eat that cookie either way. Cookie + exercise is definitely better.

Sometimes people make marginal improvements. Maybe a diet Coke is the first step. Next, they’ll get smaller-size fries. Then they’ll skip the apple pie. And soon they’re making themselves healthier meals entirely. Or maybe just making a few small improvements is good by itself, even if those decisions don’t necessarily lead to larger ones!

When people take marginal steps towards something better, don’t give them crap about it. Or at least, give them a little less, you know?