There’s a saying, when you fail at something: that you need to “get back on the horse.” Even the most tenacious of us rarely do that, though. What we do is get on a different horse.

We “keep trying” in the general sense, but we try new things. If someone starts a bakery and it fails, that person might “try again” by starting a different business, but you rarely see them start a new bakery. We very often take failures as indicators that we might still have a lot of fight left in us, but we shouldn’t try that specific thing again.

But why? One data point is hardly sufficient to determine that we can’t start a bakery successfully. Just the most basic examination shows the opposite, in fact! If you were trying to decide between starting a bakery, a bar, and a gym, and you’d already started an unsuccessful bakery, then at minimum you know a lot more about that business than the other two!

Try this: think about something you really wanted to do, but didn’t go super well the first time. You didn’t give up on life, but you haven’t revisited that thing. Next, make a list of five ways your life is different now than it was when you did that thing.

Here’s an easy first item for that list: Since then, you have learned at least one way not to do that thing. You’re more experienced in that area than you were before – significantly so.

I’m not saying you should only attempt the same thing over and over again. But once is definitely not enough. The trials are tough, especially when you aren’t as successful the first time as you’d hoped. But the retrials fare much better – so give them a try.

Some people thrive when they get to be proactive, and others excel when they get to react. Often we force both kinds of people into the form of work they hate.

In a way, we don’t like to see people doing either kind of work exclusively. It’s silly, but it’s human nature. When we see someone being proactive too much, they’re “rocking the boat.” Or maybe they “have their head in the clouds.” They’re “a dreamer, not a doer.” Or if they are doing, they’re “reinventing the wheel.”

Meanwhile, when we see someone who’s excellent at putting out fires but there currently isn’t one, they’re “lazy.” They “lack initiative,” and are “followers, not leaders.” They spend all day “sitting around, waiting for something to do.”

The fact is, some people are really good at making plans, and other people are really good at putting out fires. Not only are they good at those things, but they prefer to do them! But for some reason, we all really seem to dislike letting people exclusively (or even mostly) do one or the other.

When someone is a firefighter and there are no fires, we all feel this itch to have that person “do something proactive.” We pay someone to be our network troubleshooter, but when there are no network issues, we want them to be coding or something. But that makes them worse at troubleshooting! We want our firefighters to be ready to fight fires, not exhausted and distracted.

Likewise, if someone is really good at building long-term plans, it’s a crime to pull them out of that to, you know, put out a fire. We’re making them worse at the thing they’re best at.

Ultimately, I think these are symptoms of a larger issue we humans tend to have – we don’t like seeing people being successful doing things they like doing. We feel as though in order for success to be “earned,” it has to be at least a little unpleasant. If you can be successful while also being happy, your fellow humans tend to think you’re somehow scamming someone.

Don’t fall for it. Do the things you like and you’re good at – and to the extent you possibly can, don’t force other people not to. Whenever you have the authority to let planners plan and troubleshooters shoot trouble – let them be active the way they want to be.

“Some people don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain.”

We have tolerances for pain and tolerances for damage. Fire will inflict pain before it inflicts damage to most people, most of the time – and mostly, that’s how we want it. If fire did damage to you before it hurt you, we’d have all burned up long ago.

But pain is a powerful motivator. So powerful, in fact, that we sometimes need to shut it down (or at least, lessen it) to do something which will damage us – but which must be done. I don’t want to be a slave to my “pain/damage” index if my child is in a burning building. I need to be able to take some damage to accomplish a goal.

That’s a button that can break easily. If we push our pain down below our damage too often, we can permanently cross the wires. This is especially true for non-physical pain. Sometimes something hurts us emotionally very badly, but we push past it to accomplish something. Maybe we do that one too many times, and we lose the sense to come in out of the rain.

Pain of all kinds is an early warning system. We need to push past it sometimes, but honestly we should listen to it more often. You can be out in the pain so long that you forget how to come back out of it.

Get a drill. Go spend good money – as much as you can afford – on a really good drill. Take good care of it, and it will pay for itself a hundred times over every year. Seriously, drills solve so many problems. You can fix ninety-eight out of every hundred problems you encounter with a drill.

Drills should be up there with fire and the wheel in terms of inventions that have benefitted humanity. This isn’t even just a home-owner thing. If you live in an apartment, on a boat, in your car – if you have room for a drill, get one. And if you don’t, throw something else away because very few things will be as useful to you as a drill would be.

Someday, I will be gone. Some part of why I maintain this blog is the idea that my children (or maybe even grandchildren) will someday look to this for the advice I can no longer give them in person. So I try to talk about how to think clearly, how to be a good person, and how to understand your fellow humans. But also sometimes, the best advice is just very, very down to Earth: get a drill.

You can learn to save humanity tomorrow. Today, fix the door.

If you ever want to kill me, just give me a clever and repetitive puzzle in a room with no clocks or windows. I’ll starve to death.

It’s a natural human impulse to have an opinion on everything. Everything requires your input, everything deserves a “take,” and you need to decide everything that comes within your reach. It’s so ingrained in us that we perceive its absence in others as rude! If you and a friend are going to dinner and you ask them where they’d like to eat, you get frustrated when they say “I don’t care.” You take them not caring about where they eat as if they meant they didn’t care about the entire encounter – including spending time with you.

This is absolutely an impulse worth fighting. Life becomes incredibly free and joyous if you just let most of it happen. You can’t control the flow of the river anyway, and trying to make too many active choices is like trying to get the river to take a new shape by splashing a few handfuls of water in new directions.

Make large decisions, when they matter. When things will kill you if you don’t pick A over B, go ahead and exert your control over the world. But letting all those little things go is a marvelous way to live. Embrace “I don’t care” as a valid – even stellar – response. We shouldn’t care about most things, so we can care deeply about the few things that matter.

There’s a trap you can fall into when you’re working really, really hard for something. Sometimes you’re striving so diligently for something in a specific way that you miss that it’s come to you in a different way entirely. You’ve focused on the task rather than the result, and you don’t even realize you’ve gotten the result!

As a general rule, any time you’re really intense about something, stop every day or so and make sure you say “I’m working this hard because I want XYZ to happen. What would it look like if that happened in another way?”

We focus so much on what’s going out, we sometimes miss what’s coming in.

Being comfortable with discomfort is a keen and convenient superpower.

Have you ever been really cold, maybe outside in a winter storm? You do all sorts of weird little things: your teeth chatter, you shiver and shake, maybe you even dance around a little.

You know what? None of that stuff makes you any warmer. In fact, some of it makes you colder!

(The best thing you can do if you’re stuck outside and it’s cold is to find a place that isn’t windy, and then just hold still. Your body will warm the air around you and it will become an insulator, but if you disrupt the warm air by bopping around, it’s less effective.)

A long time ago, I was stuck in that situation. I tried something new; I told myself to just “be cold.” As in, don’t try to fight it. I relaxed my body, purposefully letting my shoulder and neck muscles go slack. I let my jaw go loose so my teeth wouldn’t chatter. And you know what? I was cold. But that’s it. I was as cold as I was before, but I was significantly less disturbed by it. I wasn’t in pain or uncomfortable. I was just cold.

Our reactions to negative stimuli aren’t always counters to those stimuli. We think they are, because we never really stop to question their effectiveness. But frequently we just do stuff when we’re tired, angry, lonely, hungry, upset, etc., and that stuff isn’t doing anything except making us more uncomfortable.

Sometimes the thing to do is just be cold until it passes. At worst, you don’t waste effort and add to your own discomfort. At best, you think more clearly and find an actual solution to your problem – which is always better than being left in the cold.

You’ll do many things to benefit yourself. Some of those things truly are “for yourself” – purely to enrich your own existence. If you watch a beautiful sunset or enjoy a stunning piece of music, you are enriched. If you eat a little healthier and feel better as a result, that’s an improvement. Such things can truly be for you and you alone.

Other things don’t actually improve you much if other people don’t know about them. If you want to learn a new skill for the purpose of achieving more success in your career, then just learning the skill isn’t enough. Other people need to know about it, too. If become one of a handful of people in the whole world who knows a particular programming language, that doesn’t help me much if I keep it a secret!

Humans mess this up a lot – in both directions.

Many humans (not all, obviously) tend to over-signal the stuff that should be for the self, and under-signal the stuff that should be a part of their public brand. They seek validation because of the music they listen to or the food they eat, but then don’t appropriately broadcast their skills and abilities that they’ve learned specifically to help others!

I get it. Things like our aesthetic habits can be a way to find community – and if you’re doing that, great. But if you’re just sharing pictures of a salad to share them… well, take some time and try to be comfortable in your own presence for a while. And take that same impulse to share and direct it towards the things you feel less confident about. You don’t want to share that you’re learning something because that’s a level of vulnerability that isn’t carried by a picture from your jog. But that’s why you should do it.

Align the right patterns of self and signal. Those being out of whack is a cause of a great deal of ennui.