Cultivating an ability to control your desires is a worthwhile pursuit. I don’t just mean controlling the level of desire – I mean actually self-programming what you do and don’t want.

Solved problems aren’t necessarily solutions. Our brains are wired to want solved problems. We want to not be hungry, but that’s not the same as a solution to the problem of hunger. In other words, we seek out short-term results by nature.

Control that nature. Train yourself not just to not have bad things, but not to want them. And with good-but-difficult things, don’t just force yourself to do them, grumbling all the while. Condition yourself to want to do them.

Reward yourself if you need to. Trick your brain any way you can. Practice it until it sticks. Ultimately, your brain will do what it wants. Program it accordingly.

People often feel like they’re punished for success.

If you’ve been a working adult for more than 5 minutes, I can almost guarantee that you’ve experienced this. You start doing some work and you do well. Suddenly, you get more work. You get put in charge of something. You get given harder work. All of those things can feel like punishments if you didn’t ask for them!

They aren’t necessarily intended to be, of course. When people see potential, they often want to tap it. And someone may genuinely want to invest in you – so they challenge you. But again, if you didn’t ask for it, you might have been more comfortable being the big fish in your small pond.

Apart from half-assing things or self-sabotaging, how can you get around this? How can you be successful while still directing the outcome of that success?

Call your shot early. Have an understanding of what you do want, and use that to redirect other “suggestions.” For instance, maybe you don’t want to work with more challenging clients just because you’re good with communication. So make it clear that your ultimate goal is to learn enough about the business to move onto the operation side, and that’s where you’re focusing your energy.

You’re not lazy just because you don’t want every opportunity ever presented to you. But perception management is a real thing, and if you want to keep people investing in you, often it’s as simple as telling them exactly how to invest.

Falling a hundred feet onto a hard surface can likely kill you. But falling five feet twenty times, even in short succession, isn’t likely to do more than give you a few bruises.

You can’t truly prevent falls in your life. But you can usually shorten them.

Everything you care about, diversify. Did you know that some large companies have a rule that no more than a handful of their senior executives are allowed to be on the same flight? Even though flying is extremely safe, the rule exists so that no disaster can take out the whole company.

If you have a collection of antique books, it’s a good idea not to store them all in the same place. It’s a great idea not to get all your money from one source. It’s a good idea to have more than one friend you can confide in.

The ceiling can leak and get water on one bookshelf. You can lose one job. One friend can move away. These are sad things, but they don’t have to be hundred-foot disasters.

A short fall won’t hurt you. And it’s easier to get back up.

In Douglas Adams’ incredible Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, there’s an amusing scene (one among thousands) where a character is discovered to be living in a very strange house. The outside walls of the house are decorated with hung paintings, end tables, potted plants, etc. – in other words, all the typical things you’d expect to be on the inside of a house. Meanwhile, the inside of the house has grass instead of carpet, siding on the interior walls, and all the furniture is lawn/patio furniture, etc. So the house is exactly backwards.

The character that lives in the house claims to be living outside, with everyone else in the world living inside the house. The house is called “The Outside of the Asylum,” because the inhabitant has committed everyone else in the world to the looney bin.

(Incidentally, if you find this – as I do – absolutely hysterical as a concept, you should definitely read the series. The whole thing is amazing absurdist stuff like this.)

So when you build a barrier, are you keeping something out or something in?

Often it’s both, to some degree. The walls of my house keep the heat inside and the rain outside. But when it comes to intangible things rather than physical ones, it’s usually one or the other. You have “quiet time” because you don’t want noise invading that hour. You limit your kids’ “screen time” because you want to keep it contained to that block.

But try reversing it!

Many parents put a hard cap on “screen time,” telling their kids they can’t watch TV or use electronic devices for more than an hour a day or something like that. I agree with the concept – kids shouldn’t spend ages in front of screens. But I don’t like the implementation. I don’t want screen time to be the thing that’s so amazing that it has to be a sacred prize. I also don’t want to inadvertently focus my kids’ attention on it constantly by telling them “Don’t.”

So instead, I create really fun other times during which screens aren’t allowed. Screens aren’t allowed during Science Experiment Time. They aren’t allowed during Dance Party Time. They aren’t allowed during Silly Dinner Time. And they aren’t missed.

I don’t try to keep screens “in” one time. I just keep them “out” of other times, and then the actual amount of screen time takes care of itself.

So maybe don’t block off as much work time for yourself. Maybe just block off time where you absolutely will not work, and let the other stuff take care of itself.

A number of small, annoying things happened to me today. In the moment, several of them were more than annoying, in fact. But if I close my eyes and imagine a day in which none of those things occurred, the day would have ended the same way. I’ll wake up tomorrow all the same.

There are two things worth doing to annoyances: ignore them or prevent them. And those are pretty much the only two things worth doing. If you can prevent it, great. If you can’t, ignore it. And either way, you wake up tomorrow all the same.

Our memory of the crash is often dulled, even though typically humans remember the ends of things more vividly than the experience as a whole. So if you eat a bunch of candy and then get sick, you still later might want to eat a bunch more candy.

This is where facing up to what brought the crash is helpful. When you’re writhing with a tummyache, you block out the cause. You don’t want to face the reality of your torture being brought on by the thing you wanted to do – and want to do again.

Whenever you’re in pain, look for how to link it to a choice you’ve made. Heck, it might not even be connected, but why miss the opportunity to trick your brain out of a bad habit? If you break your leg, spending a little time mentally connecting that broken leg to your smoking habit might be just the thing you need to kick it.

Pain sometimes happens, the crash always comes. Don’t waste it.

All collections have constraints. Your house can only hold so many books, for example. And even when physical space isn’t the constraint, something else is; you can have as much digital music as you want, but eventually, your collection will grow too large to actually listen to in your lifetime.

The point is that for anything you like and want in your life, you’ll eventually have to filter it. You’ll have to pick and choose. When you first get into anything, you grab anything you can reach. When you first get into music you might want every album you can get. Sooner or later, though, you reach the constraints.

At that point, you become faced with a difficult, even unpleasant realization. Even though there are things you want, the barrier isn’t your ability to get it – it’s your inability to displace anything else you already have for it.

See, as you add and remove things from any collection, that collection grows more strongly aligned to your preferences. Soon almost everything that’s “made the cut” is outstanding by your point of view. This means things that are merely “great” no longer warrant inclusion because you’ve reached the walls.

I mean, it’s a good problem to have, in a way. But never forget – tastes change. Leave a little room at the margins, and don’t be afraid to be wrong about things now and then.

It’s easier to destroy trust than to build it. But it’s also easier to re-build trust than to build it in the first place.

From the baseline, trust is built in very small steps over time. You show up consistently, keep to your word, and deliver results? Then you’ll gradually be trusted more by those to whom those things matter. But missing one deadline, breaking one promise, or failing one task can drop your trust dramatically.

It’s not the end of the world, though – in fact, it’s a big opportunity. How you show up and respond when a mistake has been made can be more impactful than a hundred days of putting in the normal work.

When you mess up, ‘fess up. Own the mistake. Communicate it before anyone asks. Take responsibility in excess even of what would be put on you by others. Go radically above and beyond to fix it, and explain what you’re doing. Insulate the future from a repeat of that mistake, and show your work.

If you do all that, you’ll gain more trust than you ever lost. Anyone can be reliable when the chips are up. If you prove that you’re trustworthy when they’re down, people will never doubt you again.

There’s some conventional wisdom that says “Don’t compare yourself to anyone else; compare yourself to who you were yesterday.” For its intended purpose, I think that’s fine advice. Comparison is the thief of joy, after all, and trying to measure yourself against others (or, in truth, your inaccurate perception of others) is a sure way to make yourself miserable.

But like all things, be careful about turning good advice into an unshakable mantra that consumes your whole life. You shouldn’t always be comparing yourself to… well, yourself. Because sometimes you’re simply going to dislike even that comparison.

Despite being in my 40s, I’m in much better shape than I was in my 30s. I eat better, I work out more, and I’ve eliminated some bad habits. When I see old pictures of myself, I should say things like: “Wow, I’m pleased with all the progress I’ve made and happy that I no longer carry around all that unhealthy weight.”

Instead, I often think something like: “Gee, look at all the hair I used to have.”

I chase that thought out of my head pretty quickly, but it still pops up. And if my hair was still as thick and luscious as it was ten years ago, I’d find something else unpleasant in that comparison.

Just as you can always find some aspect of another person’s life to be jealous of, even if you wouldn’t actually trade lives with them if you could, you can always find something in your own past that you wish you could carry forward. Even if (as in my case) I wouldn’t trade lives with my 30-year-old self even if I could.

I enjoy marching forward through time. I have fun, and I certainly think I gain more than I lose. A few strands of hair here and there (and a bit more grey in the remaining ones) are well worth the wisdom and joy I collect in the process. It’s well worth a few wrinkles to watch my children barrel madly through the fun of their childhoods, explore the fun applications of my professional skills, and be able to engage more deeply with lifelong friends and communities.

The real advice isn’t to only make comparisons to your prior self. It’s to not make comparisons at all. Make goals and work toward them, but who you were yesterday has no bearing on whether you have it in you to be happy – as you – today.

Disappointment is a necessary condition of a happy life.

In order to achieve things, you must sometimes climb beyond your comfort zone. In order to have the will to do that, you must expect some chance of a positive result. If you aren’t sometimes failing, that means you’re not climbing far enough out of your comfort zone to do anything important. And that all means that sometimes, inevitably, you will expect something positive but not get it.

The sting is still real though. And when it happens to people you love, it’s worse. You want to tell them that the world is wrong and should have shifted around their expectations, but you know that isn’t true. Growing through the disappointment is just something you have to deal with.

The nature of life creates the conditions for these heartaches. It can’t be any other way – our happiness must grow from struggle.

But I’ll hold your hand, anyway.