There is no more certain death knell for actual productivity than the need to look busy.

The reality is that a lot of projects simply don’t need a hand on the tiller at all times. They need high-level direction, but too much interference at the mico level actually hinders progress. It’s like baking cookies. If you want good cookies, you need to have a good recipe and you need to mix those ingredients well – high-level stuff. But once they’re in the oven, if you open up that oven door every five minutes to check on their progress and manually adjust the shape of the dough, you’re just… you’re just not going to get good cookies, and what you do get is going to take a long time and probably burn you once or twice.

So if you’re a baker, and your boss is really concerned with how busy you look instead of how well the cookies turn out, then the cookies are going to be worse.

All this is to say, if you find yourself in such a situation, you should do your best to get out of it. At least, if you want to actually get anything done.

The first contraption the Wright Brothers built didn’t fly. And they knew it wasn’t going to fly when they built it.

But they didn’t know why it wouldn’t fly – not yet. That took experimentation. Sometimes you have to break something, failing again and again, to figure out the weak points. To improve on the design.

When you’ve done that enough, you get a keen sense of structural weak points. Someone might pull you in to observe something and ask “Do you think this will work?” They want you to say “yes,” of course. But if that isn’t true, a far more valuable answer is: “No, but I can tell you exactly why.”

When responsibility is deferred enough, people would rather charge blindly ahead than see the weak points. Pointing out problems doesn’t make you popular, and if there’s almost no chance that you’ll be blamed personally for the resultant disaster, a prudent strategy can just be to keep your head down and not rock the boat.

If you see an organization where that does seem to be the default strategy – run. When no one is responsible, then… well, no one is responsible.

You want to be the kind of person who can explain the miss. But once you are, you want to make sure you’re in a room where they’re happy you did it.

Whenever you stop yourself from doing something that you want to do because of fear, personalize it. Turn that voice into a person – imagine someone standing in front of you, demanding that you stop your attempt. Telling you that you’re not allowed. That he forbids it, in fact!

I’m not sure about you, but external people telling me I can’t do things tend to make me want to do those things a lot. So much that it’s probably a fault on its own, but hey – maybe I can turn it to some good here.

Because if I wouldn’t let Mr. Fear tell me that, why should I listen to the same words in my own head?

My first sales manager once explained to me a very poor sales technique that he would often see, as a way of warning me away from it. He said: “Never sell on rescission.”

“Rescission” is a fancy term for canceling a contract. Many states have laws requiring contracts above a certain amount to have a built-in period of time where the contract can be canceled at no penalty. Poor salespeople, eager to get the name on the dotted line, would use that as a selling technique. They’d basically say something like: “Don’t worry about signing right now; you have a three-day cancelation period so if you change your mind, you can always cancel it tomorrow.”

You can probably already see why that’s a bad sales technique. You’re practically asking someone to cancel on you, and you’re ignoring any reasonable objections they might have in the moment, when it’s possible that you could spend a little more time and find an actual solution that works for you and your client.

In any transaction, you have to not just sell the transaction itself. You have to sell the sale. You have to make the other party feel good about the deal they just made. Imagine you buy a cup of coffee for five bucks at a coffee shop. This is a pretty standard transaction, right? Okay, now imagine as soon as you handed over the money, the cashier yelled “No refunds! Hahahaha!” You’d probably not be enthusiastic about drinking the cup of coffee you’re about to get!

Perception matters. You should never make people feel like they just got taken – that’s not the way to get repeat business (or even to keep the business you just got). If you’re trying to build a strong foundation, you should make people feel thrilled to have made the deal with you. You should treat them even better after they’ve signed than you did before.

Unless, of course, you actually are scamming people. In which case… you know, don’t do that. But honest businesspeople can (and often do) shoot themselves in the foot because they don’t use basic sales techniques. In fact, the misconception that good sales professionalism is always shady is what keeps so many businesspeople from getting good at it, but really it’s just about savvy interactions that help all parties find what they’re looking for in mutually beneficial exchanges of maximum value.

And you get those by being good to people.

Sometimes you start a project of some kind and you don’t complete it. It happens. Do you remember “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle?” Let’s make a slogan for your old projects: “Revisit, Reclaim, Remember.”

Revisit: You can always come back to a project later! Just because it’s been a few days – or a few years – doesn’t mean the project can’t be picked up again. It’s right where you left it. Coming back to an old project can revitalize your creativity, even if you use that creativity differently now.

Reclaim: The bits and pieces of that project might become fodder for a new one. Started writing a book but never finished? Maybe the main character finds her way into the screenplay you’re working on. Our creativity is modular; use it where it needs to go.

Remember: You don’t owe anything to your past self. If you want to just remember – fondly! – the efforts of the past and the enjoyment spent on them, that’s fine. You don’t have to have finished something to have enjoyed it and gained something from it.

Don’t let the past weigh you down. If an old, lingering project feels like it’s tugging on you, figure out which of these three it’s asking you to do. Then do it – and be done!

You may occasionally find yourself being carried by circumstance. Something is happening and there isn’t much you can do to prevent it or even steer it. It happens – we can’t be in control all the time.

When you find yourself in this circumstance, I’ve often found the best thing to do is just take a nap. Some things can’t be helped! You got on the wrong train, maybe? Well guess what, it’s not turning around for you. Figure out when the next stop is, then rest your eyes. If you can plan a little, go ahead. But worrying wastes energy.

When you can do something well with minimal effort, go find the people for whom it’s the hardest.

Your inclination is often to “be around people who appreciate you,” and you think that means your peers. So if you’re good at gardening, you want to be around other gardeners. But if you’re really good at it and it’s low-effort for you to be that good, then you add the most value surrounded by people who can’t keep a cactus alive.

There is a cascade effect required for action to create change. A series of dominoes has to fall, and keep falling, for any lasting impact to be made. It’s the difference, in a way, between pushing a ball uphill and pushing it downhill; in the latter case, soon the ball will start rolling without you.

If you take an action that no one responds to, including yourself, change won’t result. But if you act, and someone else reacts, and then someone else reacts to that (and any of these people can be you, again and again) – that’s the formula for change.

It’s not just something happening. It’s a chain reaction. Sometimes you have to make a lot of things happen first – you have to rub those two sticks together for a long time before you get the spark that ignites the whole pile of wood. So keep at it.

Resources are generally good. If you have more food, money, time, etc. it’s generally better than if you have less of those things.

But there’s definitely such a thing as intangible “reverse resources;” boons that kick in specifically when you’re in need. We’ve all experienced the sudden surge of clarity and motivation that comes from being short on time. Predators get meaner and sharper when they’re hungry. We get careless when we have a lot of money, but a sharp frugality arises when we have little.

That’s not to say that you should put your back to the wall constantly in order to maximize your “reverse resources.” After all, those things kick in specifically to help us obtain the very resources we’re lacking – the predator’s senses don’t sharpen so it can go rock-climbing. The hunger rage kicks in so it can get food.

But we’re not wild predators. We have some conscious control, which means we can manipulate the balance a little. We can give ourselves these boosts if we’re careful. We can do it for fun – try taking a day trip with only cash, no phone or credit cards, and you’ll find the experience quite different. But we can also do it because we need to.

When we need to.

An old parable: A huge factory that produces millions of dollars worth of output a day has ground to a halt. Somewhere in the many hundreds of thousands of square feet of machinery is a malfunction, and until it gets fixed the factory is frozen. An engineer – a specialist – is brought in to figure out the problem. He walks into the factory, strolls over to one box out of thousands, opens it up, and turns one screw a quarter-turn. The whole factory immediately roars back to life. The engineer charges the factory owners ten thousand dollars. They’re flabbergasted! Ten thousand dollars to turn one screw? The engineer explains, no – ten thousand dollars to know which screw to turn.

In the beginning of your career, you don’t know anything. You don’t have any specialized skills. (And by the way, no you don’t, don’t pretend otherwise – if you think that your degree with zero work experience has made you an exception to this rule, then you’re going to find the first few years of your career extremely frustrating.) So the only thing you have to offer as value is your hustle – your willingness to work. You get, keep, and advance in jobs on the back of how much you’re willing to do.

Along the way, you learn skills. And at some point, you become the engineer. When you cross over that line, the way you manage your career should totally change. You no longer sell yourself based on how hard you’ll work, but on how much value you’ll create. Of course, your hard work in the beginning was creating value, too – but not nearly as much, and not nearly as certainly. Several employers may have had to take chances on you, and for some, that chance might not have paid off.

The thing is, many people don’t realize when they’ve crossed that line They’ve become experts while still thinking they need to break their backs to impress. People aren’t generally in a rush to tell someone they’re paying that they should be paying more, so you really need to advocate for yourself. And that means having an accurate assessment of what side of that line you’re on.

Talk to people. As often as you can, talk to professional peers who don’t have a direct relationship to you. Mentor some people, and be mentored by others. Know the lay of the land.

And when you cross that line, act like it.