“A negative emotion is an unmet need.”

I heard this particular insight in a meeting today, and it immediately resonated. This is a spectacular way to view any negative emotion, even ones directed at you or coming from you.

Why? Because an unmet need is an opportunity. It’s a chance to meet that need and improve a few lives – yours included.

Don’t think of negative emotions as if they were lasers aimed at you with the purpose of bringing you down. Think of them as distress signals; as requests for help. Sometimes they’re in code, because the person doesn’t know how to articulate their needs in a better way. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be helped! In fact, it often means there’s greater value in doing so.

When you find a way to meet that need or at least get someone closer, you improve their lives. And in the great game of life, that’s worth points. It’s altruism if you want it to be, and it’s productive opportunity if you want it to be that. But whatever your personal motivation, it’s an invitation that you should accept.

When someone offers to help you, try very hard not to get mad about it.

It sounds like wild advice in a vacuum, but some people get absolutely steamed when offered help. Something about an offer of assistance can come across as an insult – a sneering accusation that you aren’t good enough to handle whatever’s in front of you. A status-smashing attack on our very competency! The very insinuation that you aren’t superhuman can feel like you’re being treated like slime.

Our brains are status-evaluation machines that run 24/7/365, so it’s natural that this happens. But here’s the thing – that machine is badly tuned. There absolutely are some spheres of your life where status matters and is actually being observed and evaluated. But it’s definitely not always. If you have five grocery bags in your hands and someone offers to hold the door for you or even – gasp – carry one of the bags, that person definitely isn’t playing a status game with you.

Don’t be too good for free resources. If someone wants to give their own juice to you, then let your life get easier. Don’t be your own worst enemy just because your brain treats status as a live wire. It’s not.

All relationships of any kind begin with a single connection. If you want to improve the number or quality of your relationships, get better at that first connection. Define it better, strengthen your ability to communicate it, and get a better idea of who belongs on the other side of it.

When you sell a product, it’s not enough to understand why the product is great. You also need to understand the needs of the intended user of the product and what they need to know about it in order to appreciate it. In other words, you need to know about the connection itself, not just your side of it.

Some people just don’t know how to cash the check, you know?

It’s important in life to know when you’re beat. But it’s just as important – and apparently, harder – to know when you’ve won. Some people have the check in their hand, and all they have to do is cash it. But instead, they talk. Or they fight, or they cause trouble, or they do anything else.

It’s like a mouse getting the cheese out of a trap without it going off, and instead of running, they suspect some greater trap. So they end up trying to put the cheese back or something, and bam.

When you’ve gotten your prize, go. Know when to win. Know when to cash the check.

The more you try to avoid being “pigeonholed,” the less likely you are to be known at all.

Generalists are fillers. They pinch-hit. It’s the specialists that carve out a well-known niche. Being pigeonholed is one of the best things that can happen to you, as long as it’s for something you want to do.

The best character actors are pigeonholed as heck, but they’re also famous and constantly working. Whereas leading “everyman” characters like the main protagonist of a Hallmark movie are here and gone in a week.

Figure out a thing or two that you like doing, and let people know you for it! Lean into it, make it your brand, do it a bunch. And get good at it – then charge appropriately. After all, you’re the best in your category!

Your brain is full of mush and garbage. It’s a total dumpster fire in there. Whole parts of it are complete mysteries to you; other parts are actively working against you. Most of it is trying to keep you alive, at least, but often in ways that are completely counter-productive to living a healthy and fulfilling life in the modern world.

It’s an autopilot designed by an endless series of serial barbarians going back hundreds of thousands of years. Along the way, it’s picked up a museum of bad wiring.

Most of your brain is reactionary. Without outside stimuli, a lot of that programming is dormant. If nothing scares, threatens, or tempts you, then mostly your brain’s biggest vice is sloth.

Why am I trash-talking your brain so much? As a reminder that you have a reasonable amount of control over what stimuli get through the mental drawbridge into the little castle on top of the trash heap. Above all that other junk is one small oasis of conscious thought, and it’s just enough to be a gatehouse between the outside world and the roiling chemical soup that steers 95% of your actions.

Have you ever mixed baking soda and vinegar? It causes quite a reaction. Once you drop one into the other, you can’t stop the reaction – you probably can’t even contain it. It’s going to make quite a mess unless you’re well-prepared, and maybe even regardless. Trying to contain the reaction once the elements are mixed is a fool’s errand. But that’s what many people try to do – they try to use what little conscious faculty they have to control their reactions to things.

What you should be doing is using that gatehouse to make sure that the baking soda never gets dropped into the boiling vinegar of your brain to begin with. Don’t lower the drawbridge for things with little to no value, expecting that you’ll be able to maintain your values, honor, and nobility even as the chemical reaction has started. You won’t.

Building something big as a community project has its joys, and is worth doing. But building something small all on your own is golden.

That little thing you do yourself – for yourself – is a nugget of pure joy. It can be painting a picture. It can be making a pizza from scratch. What matters is that all those little twists and turns in the process become yours, rough edges and all. Not smoothed out by the thousand lessons learned from a thousand practitioners before you. All yours.

Get that rough little gem, polish it just a tiny bit, and then let the light shine on it.

Have you ever tried “pushing a rope?” It’s different than pushing, say, a boulder.

A boulder is heavy; it resists being moved. It’s stubborn. A piece of rope isn’t like that. You can push all you want and you’ll meet no resistance at all – but still, the rope won’t go anywhere.

Some people are stubborn, too. I can often respect those people; certainly I can respect them much more than the people who are just pieces of rope, or puddles of water, or whatever other metaphor you want to use for a horse that eagerly lets you lead them to water, but just never seems to drink.

Motivation, the real stuff, it has to come from within. You can’t spoon-feed it to anyone. If they don’t want to be there, you can’t make them. What you can do is ask them where they want to be, and lead them there. That horse will drink, because it asked. It invested.

So there’s the two-part formula. You need a horse that wants to drink, and you need a river that you want to go to. If you have both halves, you get the team. But trying to force one or the other when it isn’t there is… well, it’s pushing rope.

Happy New Month!

February gets an extra day this year, so that’s an extra day to try for a particularly onerous goal: making improvements to my sleep schedule.

I’m not even going to set the bar at “fixing” my sleep schedule, which is notoriously borked. But it’s time to take some steps in the right direction. It’s actually been worsening lately, which is all the more reason to try to reverse that trend – or at the very least, stop it from progressing.

I’ll consider it a major win if – at least one time – I am asleep for 8 consecutive hours while it’s dark outside. That has not happened in… well, I’ll be honest, I can’t remember the last time that happened, so there you go.

Wish me luck!