Many people fall into the trap of waiting to solve a problem until they have the right “setup” to do so. Here’s an illustrative example:

Many parents of young babies find that when it’s near to bedtime, the baby starts crying. And some of those parents try to soothe the baby before putting it down to bed, not wanting to put a crying baby down. So they rock the baby, sing to it, pat it, walk around the house – all the while, getting more and more stressed and anxious and frustrated, and all the while doing absolutely nothing for the baby.

They want to soothe the baby before they put it down to sleep. But putting it down to sleep is what will soothe it!

The setup is the solution. If you put that baby down as soon as it started to fuss, it would fall asleep.

This works on all sorts of problems. Whatever you think you need to do before you solve a problem is probably just one step that you’re splitting into two and making it far harder as a result. Figure out what you want to be true – what’s the “sleeping baby” of this situation – and go after it directly. Skip setup steps. If the first attempt doesn’t work, you can always reevaluate and go backward a bit, but chances are good that it’s less complicated than you think it is.

Creating your own space in the world is a good thing. The best lives are lived in small circles. But no matter how beautiful of a bubble you craft for yourself, occasionally you’ll have to leave it and interact with the outside world.

So don’t forget their customs! Remember how to say hello and what they expect. It’s polite, for one. But more importantly, it’s how to get what you want from that world and make it back to your own little one in one piece.

If you want to do something, the question isn’t usually whether or not you can. The question is usually: “How weird are you willing to get to make it work?”

Very few things can be accomplished in a straight line from Point A to Point B. But very few things can’t be accomplished if you’re willing to find that strange and twisting path. The limitation for most people is simply how strange of a path they can imagine.

The stranger the better, when it comes to making it work.

A few decades ago, my father put an addition – a second story – onto my childhood home to make room for my soon-to-arrive baby sister. His goal was to get 3 bedrooms and a bathroom up there. Several architects told him it was impossible, that given the size of the footprint he had to work with, the building codes, and so on, there was simply no way to put 3 bedrooms and a bathroom up there.

Go into that house now, and you’ll find 3 bedrooms and a bathroom up there. They’re all of normal size, too. They’re just configured in just about the strangest way you’d imagine. The rooms themselves are all normal, but the hallway that leads between them is straight out of a carnival funhouse. My father could envision the strange path, so he designed it himself and made it work.

Make it weird to make it work!

It’s natural to equate whatever your situation looks like to the overall health of the system you’re in. Whatever job you do, you think it’s vital to the company – and that the company not prioritizing that job means that they company is making bad decisions. If you paint, then if people like your paintings you say that the art community as a whole is thriving and healthy, whereas if your paintings are unpopular you think art has gotten too commercial and nobody respects true creativity anymore.

“What’s the world coming to?” laments the last beeper salesman or video rental store or horse-drawn carriage maker.

You can’t stand against the tide of the world. You can stay in one place, sure. But the tide moves regardless. If you want what the world offers, give the world what it wants. There’s fun stuff to do everywhere. Don’t get so committed to your thing that you’re doing right this second that you let it drown you.

The point of a goal isn’t always to reach it. Sometimes, the point is to orient yourself in a positive direction. In some circumstances, it’s quite positive to set a goal you know is unattainable, simply because striving for it every day is exactly what you need.

If you suddenly received a million-dollar windfall, what’s one thing you do now that you would stop?

What’s one thing you don’t do that you would start?

The answers to those two questions say a lot about you – and where you should put your energy. Most of those things don’t take a million dollars, they just take a belief in our own freedom, and we think that a huge check will come with that belief attached to it.

Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. But you probably won’t get a million dollars tomorrow.

You could get that belief, though.

What would you do if you got really bad news – that was very delayed?

If you found out that a comet was going to strike the Earth in ten years, how would you react? Ten years is too far out to panic; even if I wanted to, I couldn’t sustain panic for that long. Knowing that the end was coming in ten years makes things seem… well, I don’t know. Giving up seems like the wong answer. I can have a lot of fun in ten years! And heck, I can’t even be certain that I’ll have ten years, comet or no. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, right?

Statistically, even on the day of the comet strike there will be people who die some other way. Certainty about one bad thing doesn’t remove all the other uncertainty about all the other things, good and bad.

And there’s always that outside chance, however small, that the comet misses. Maybe another comet hits it at the last second. Maybe humans invent an anti-comet rocket defense system within ten years. Who knows? It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

Don’t let bad news about a distant day rob you of the close ones.

Most people react too quickly to problems.

I’ll use parenting as an example, but this is far beyond just a problem parents have. Let’s say you’re watching your young kid play in the backyard. You’re enjoying a book and some lemonade and they’re running around being a kid. Over the course of about an hour, that kid will do maybe 70 or 80 things that will look like they might turn into a disaster. They’ll pick up a rock, and some part of your brain will yell at you: “They’re going to throw that rock through a window! They’re going to try to eat it! They’re going to stab themselves in the eye with it! TELL THEM TO PUT IT DOWN!”

And of course, they aren’t going to do any of that stuff. They might put it in their pocket or use it to dig up other rocks, but it’s not going to be a disaster. If you wait 3 more seconds, you’ll see it. If you react immediately, you’ll not only give your kid a complex, but you’ll end up never reading that book and stressing yourself out and just going absolutely nuts.

This is most people, with most problems. An email comes in with a question about a project proposal you submitted. You freak out, your brain saying: “Did I forget to include that info? Did I do a bad job? Do I need to cover and scramble and come up with an excuse? Do I need to frantically drop whatever I’m working on right now and address this?” But if you wait, maybe 5 minutes later here comes the email: “Never mind, found the info on the next slide. Thanks!”

Very few situations will resolve any differently if you wait half an hour to address them instead of reacting immediately, but a large number will resolve themselves in that time. This is like the way animals do threat assessment: if you panic at the first sight of any predator, you waste so many calories running when you don’t have to that you’ll drop dead before any predator gets near you. Likewise, if you react immediately to every problem you’ll never live your life and you’ll end up creating more problems anyway.

Practice taking a calm measure of new information. Absorb, consider, then act. Reacting is an automatic response; it means the problem is controlling you, instead of the reverse.

All things are changing their shape over time. There is no such thing as static, no permanence. Nothing can be held. You can grow in the shape that matches the things you like, and you can nudge those things a little in your direction, too.

If you find something you haven’t paid attention to in a long time, its shape may be unrecognizable to you now. That doesn’t mean it can’t fit in the tableau of your life, but it may have to fit in a different spot. Or maybe there’s no gap that quite allows it, and nothing you’d prefer to shift to make it so. Sometimes this is just how things happen.

That too, is growth.