Remember the Serenity Prayer? “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.“

That “wisdom to know the difference” part is pretty important, but I mostly see it applied in one direction – as advice to people who are constantly railing against the immutable aspects of the universe. Sometimes it rains, and you can’t do a thing about it – so quit complaining.

But lately I’ve noticed that more often than we’d like to admit, we humans make our mistakes in the opposite direction. We turn things that are very much under our control into immutable facts of the universe in our heads. We often do it in order to escape the shame we feel about the choices we’ve made.

But as long as we keep doing that, we’re going to keep making those same choices. We don’t leave ourselves any alternative as long as don’t even accept that we’re making a choice to begin with.

It’s painful to admit, of course. But it’s absolutely necessary. Don’t hang your head and say “I have to go to work today.” You don’t have to! You choose to, because you’re choosing one set of consequences (being miserable but making money) over another (not being miserable but not making any money). But you’ll never be able to explore alternatives as long as you hide from yourself the fact that you’re making an active decision about your life. As long as you use tricks of language and willful ignorance to disguise the fact that you own the agency over these outcomes, they’ll never change.

That’s the first step. No matter how miserable the action is, accept that you’re choosing it. When your friend asks if you want to go on a road trip or your partner asks if you want to spend a romantic evening at home, don’t say “I can’t – I have to go to work.”

Instead, say: “I do want to, but I’m choosing to go to work instead. I value time with you, but I value my continued employment more.”

You will not like saying that. But it will be true – until it isn’t, and you change.

When your brain doesn’t want to do something, it will look for any possible escape route. Prisoners want to escape prison, too – but they can’t just walk out the front door. If they want to escape, they have to disguise the fact that they’re doing so. They can’t just dig a tunnel in the yard; they have to hide it behind a Rita Hayworth poster.

Your brain will do that, too. Your subconscious brain won’t say “I really don’t want to work out today because I’m lazy and unmotivated.” Instead, it will try to distract you. It will hide the escape tunnel inside things like “better organize these pillows” and “you know, you aren’t feeling so well today, you should lie down.”

We are not a unified being. We have many voices, often at war. The crafty ones try to slip past the more vigilant ones.

Recognize the escape tunnel for what it is, and get to work.

I am generally a proponent of “marginal steps to a better world.” Make small, incremental changes. Improve little things, as long as you’re improving.

Sometimes though, you’re careening toward a cliff. Slowing down gradually isn’t going to save you. You need the drastic brake, the cold turkey, the hard reset.

You shouldn’t do it often. It often has unintended consequences; disruptions to things other than what you’re aiming for. But you also shouldn’t do it often because it rarely works. It’s an emergency option for when less drastic measures have been exhausted.

But when you do it, do it right. Burn the boats. Don’t leave yourself any escape routes. Commit; put money on it if you have to. Whatever it takes to grab that last lifeline before you go over.

The last thing you want to do is have to do it again.

When you learn about other people, you get better at predicting their actions. That’s helpful and generally makes your life better.

The same is true of learning about yourself. Except it’s harder.

Imagine that you learn that your boss is really cranky every day from noon until 1. Then they eat lunch, and they come back pleasant as a peach. If you’re reasonably intelligent, you’ll recognize the pattern – they obviously get cranky from hunger and are in a good mood after their blood sugar goes back up. You can use this knowledge to make your own life easier; you would make sure to schedule meetings with your boss only after lunch. If you had to meet earlier, you’d make sure to bring a snack and casually offer some to the boss. It would be easy exactly because you have no reason to doubt your own observations.

Now imagine that you get really cranky every day from noon until 1. Then you eat lunch and you come back in a great mood. In theory, it should be even easier to take advantage of this information! Don’t schedule meetings during your low times, and put emergency snacks in your desk drawer for the meetings that have to happen anyway. Because you can control your own behavior, this information about yourself should be even easier to take advantage of than the same information about your manager.

Except it isn’t, is it? Because unlike the info about your manager, you don’t like this information. You don’t want to believe you could be a jerk just because you needed a bite to eat, and you certainly don’t believe you’re ever an unwarranted jerk. Since your behavior is always justified, it doesn’t need to change – or even be acknowledged! The incredibly simple act of having a snack – perfectly fine for your boss – is demeaning to even suggest as a reaction to your mood.

People will go to years of therapy before they’ll eat a snack and go outside, you know?

From about the ages of 25-30, your brain and body are settling into more or less the configuration they’ll have for the next 50 years. So that’s a really great time to read the operating manual, so to speak. Observe your own behavior like you’d observe others’. Figure out the basic controls. Peruse the FAQ.

“When someone tells you who they are, believe them.” Doubly true when both parties are you.

What can you put in a barrel to make a barrel lighter?

(Answer at the end. It’s not helium.)

When you want something and then you get it, it can have a tendency to be bigger in your life than you anticipated. “When it rains, it pours” and all that. It’s not uncommon to get more than you bargained for, because we don’t often fully realize the conceptual space something is going to take up in our lives.

We need to poke some breathing holes, so to speak. If you get a dog and you’ve never owned one before, you can be in for a rude awakening. The pup takes up more physical space than you anticipated, costs more to take care of and replace what gets damaged, requires more of your time and energy than you thought, etc. It’s just bigger. If you don’t give yourself a little space it can overwhelm you – you need to poke some breathing holes in that box, so to speak. Maybe that’s a dog-walking service you hire. Maybe it’s splitting bulk food orders with fellow dog-owners. But somehow, you need to carve out space for the life you want to keep.

That’s what you can put in a barrel to make the barrel lighter – a hole.

Nothing is obvious. If you think the solution to some widespread problem is “obvious” and everyone else is simply foolish for missing it, then there’s only one fool in the room, I’m afraid.

People know things because they learn things, and they learn things through effort and challenge. Other than how to walk and eat, virtually no knowledge comes “naturally” to humans. But the brain is a funny thing, and loves to be confident where it shouldn’t be. So your brain will jump with great certainty to “obvious” answers, especially when the risk of being wrong is virtually zero.

(The above paragraph explains why almost all opinions are terrible.)

Experts can lie, and non-experts don’t know anything. So your only reasonable path is to become an expert yourself on things that actually matter, and ignore everything else. It’s hard, but it’s happier.

When you’re teaching someone how to do something, what’s important is that they learn how to do it, not that they understood how you taught them. If you’re teaching someone how to ride a bike, it doesn’t matter that they gain a deep appreciation of your pedagogy. What matters is that they can ride a bike at the end of the lesson.

Unless, of course, you’re teaching someone how to teach.

If you’re teaching anything in the vein of leadership skills, training methods, public speaking, etc. – in other words, if you’re teaching people how to do the very thing you’re currently doing – then be transparent with your methods! Anything that’s working for you could work for them, and it may give your audience a deeper connection with your content as well as your methods.

What’s important isn’t just that they learn; it’s that they teach. It’s a unique case, but often an easy one. If you’re good at it, all you have to do is explain why.

What appears bountiful today may disappear tomorrow. But hoarding serves no one – if a thing is valuable enough to be missed, it’s too valuable to let pass without enjoyment. The most valuable things are precious precisely because they cannot be preserved; you can’t save a beautiful day for a rainy one.

Sometimes you’re safe. You don’t need to guard against danger or scarcity. So let those feelings fade from your mind when you can, and let the others bloom.

The key to getting good at anything is just to start. But starting isn’t always easy.

For many people, just being bad at something is enough of a detriment that they never start at all, so of course they never get good. But that’s just the table stakes; you have to be willing to suck at something for a while first.

Assuming you get over that mental block (and you should!), the next thing is just this: stuff costs juice to even try.

And different things require different amounts of juice, which is the thrust of my post today. If you want to take up “walking” as a hobby, that’s not very costly. You need some comfortable shoes, and that’s about it. But if you want to try out yachting, that’s a bit more of an investment up front.

As I think about most of my hobbies, they fall into one of two categories: either they’re low-barrier-to-entry hobbies that I got into myself, or they’re high-barrier-to-entry hobbies that a friend was already into.

See, unless you have a lot of excess resources or you’re very unusual, you probably don’t just decide one day to buy a yacht when you’ve never been on one. It’s more likely that someone in your peer group has one, and you go on it frequently until you decide “Yeah, this is something I want to do.”

High-barrier-to-entry hobbies become exceedingly easier if they’re part of a peer group experience. So the real lesson is this: have a varied peer group! Make new friends and say “yes” to stuff they want to do.

I’m always amazed when a friend (or even casual acquaintance) asks me if I want to participate in their niche hobby and is surprised when I say yes. The default experience for so many people seems to be to ask someone to try a new thing and receive rejection after rejection. What a terrible way to live! I want to try stuff. I won’t like all of it, but if I don’t try then I won’t find the stuff I do like. I’ve tried lots of stuff I only did once, but I’ve also ended up with fantastic hobbies that I’d never have discovered otherwise.

So to bring this full circle – even the hobby of “trying stuff” can be something you have to suck at in order to get good at. So to ever get good, you first need to just start. The next time someone asks you to do a weird thing, say yes!

Imagine you walk into a movie theater with the intention of buying a ticket to see a show. You discover that the theater now has two different pricing tiers for seats: seats near the front or back are 20 dollars, and seats in the middle of the theater are 25.

The theater could present this pricing differential to you in a few different ways. Here are two possibilities – read them both and tell me which one made you feel generally better:

1. “Ticket Price: $25. Get five dollars off if you sit near the front!”
2. “Ticket Price: $20. Additional $5 fee if you want the good seats.”

I’m guessing that Option #1 made you feel generally happy and Option #2 kind of angered you, if you’re like most people. This is true even though they’re saying the same thing!

When credit cards first became a big thing in the United States, local merchants used to charge a little extra to use them, on account of that merchant having to pay an additional fee to the credit card companies for processing. The credit card companies lobbied to make this illegal; they wanted there to be no difference in pricing to the consumer so people wouldn’t be opposed to using the cards. This got struck down, because business owners are allowed to charge what they want, generally. But the credit card companies had an immediate Plan B lined up; they said if merchants were allowed to charge different prices, they wanted it mandatory that the difference be listed as a “cash discount” not a “credit penalty.”

They understood perfectly well.

Whenever there is a difference between two prices, humans are generally fine if the higher price is the standard and the other is a “discount” for (X). They are generally NOT okay if the lower price is the standard and the other is a “penalty” for (Y). That makes them mad.

Remember that any time you need to present two options to someone. Whichever one is the “more expensive” option should be the default – then offer discounts. Whichever option they pick, they’ll be happier.