Take it one leg at a time, and you can go any distance. Stretch your legs when you need to. Range is unlimited, even if you need to rest for the night.

Plans change. Life changes. Sometimes your routine is disrupted. Sometimes you’re the one disrupting it, for good reason.

The fact that plans will almost never go according to themselves is no reason not to make them.

Use the default. Have a standard deviation, something to measure. A mean to regress to. Deviations aren’t chaos, they’re information. And they can be rewarding. But the plan is still the plan.

There’s a truly terrible negotiation technique that people routinely use. It’s not only awful for negotiation, it’s awful for your soul.

Here’s how it plays out: Person A attempts to initiate a transaction. Person B shows the tiniest, slightest bit of hesitation. Person A then immediately – and unprompted – drops their prices.

Mike: “Hey, would you like to buy this bike for $100?”
Mary: “Well, I don’t really…”
Mike: “50 bucks!”

First and foremost, the second you drop your price without some sort of actual transaction, you immediately lose all credibility. It sounds like your initial price was an inflated lie. So why should I trust your new price? Every word out of your mouth is suspect now, and I certainly won’t trust your valuation of whatever you’re trying to sell.

Second, most people do this before they even know what the objection is! Heck, some people do it before they even get an objection, like Mike. When someone doesn’t want to agree to your deal, sometimes it’s about the price. Often it’s about trust, or need, or rapport, or some qualifying consideration that has nothing to do with the nominal price range. If someone doesn’t want your bike at $100, there’s only a tiny chance that they’ll want it at $50 – and you’ve reduced the odds that they’ll trust you enough to buy it at any price by pulling that move.

Lastly, this is just so damaging to your own self-worth. Understand that I’m not just talking about selling bikes here. “Price” can mean a lot of things. Consider this similar interaction between Mike and Mary:

Mike: “Hey Mary, want to go see a movie with me on Friday?”
Mary: “Well, I don’t really…”
Mike: “It doesn’t have to be a movie! Anything you want!”

It’s the same thing. Mike attempted to initiate a transaction – the two of them, hanging out. Mike’s “price” was willingness to see a movie, presumably because he wanted to. The second Mike sensed hesitation, he dropped his price – from “willingness to see a movie” to “willingness to do anything at all.” If Mike and Mary are friends, then he’s devaluing himself by immediately dismissing his own wants. Just like with the hundred-dollar price tag of the bike, he’s saying that his own valuation of how much he’s worth was an inflated lie that even he didn’t believe and that crumbled under the slightest wind.

When the other person turns you down, your internal thought process sounds something like this: “Jeez, even though I dropped my prices, they didn’t buy. That means that even my lowered price was too high, so whatever I have to offer must be worth even less than I thought.” And that’s a bad thing to think about a bike – and much worse to think about yourself.

The reality is that they didn’t turn you down because of your price. They turned you down because that negotiation “technique” ruins your credibility and rapport. It makes you seem like a desperate liar, and no one wants to buy a bike from someone they perceive to be a desperate liar. They don’t want to go to the movies with them, either.

Now, that’s not to say you can’t ever negotiate your prices. But that’s different! If someone offers you $75 for the bike after you say it’s $100, then maybe you can haggle. If someone tells you that they’re not into the movies this week, but they’re willing to treat you if you grab a burger instead, then we’re in business. Negotiating your price isn’t the same as dropping your price. Negotiating is a win/win. Dropping your price is a lose/lose.

If you go to a low-cost fast-food restaurant and you’re upset that your food isn’t gourmet, that’s not a reasonable complaint. Not only are you the one with silly expectations about the restaurant’s food, you also have silly expectations about the way they’ll handle complaints.

That’s not to say you’re wrong about the quality of the food! The food probably wasn’t good! But unless it was uniquely bad even for the context, then that’s about what you should expect, and you definitely shouldn’t expect the people working there to care.

This isn’t about lowered standards. It’s about proper expectations. If your standards were higher, you just wouldn’t have gone there in the first place. If you get mad that the Gucci purse you bought on out of somebody’s trunk at the flea market turned out to be a knock-off, that’s on you.

In other words, standards are something you impose on yourself. You can’t expect to create the value point for other people’s standards. If you don’t want a knock-off Gucci, then don’t buy bags out of people’s trunks, you know?

Sometimes I have what I call “air bubble” problems. If you’ve ever put down a large sticker on something, you know that you have to avoid air bubbles. If you don’t, they get trapped under there – and pushing them down only makes them pop back up somewhere else. They’re tricky to get rid of entirely.

Some problems feel like that. You solve the immediate problem, but the solution causes some other problem, and solving that one cascades into a series of new ones. In some cases, you may even find yourself circling back around and causing the original problem all over again!

The economic adage is true: “There are no solutions; only trade-offs.” Sometimes you have to just look for the Pareto-optimal solution and take that deal when you find it.

But sometimes… sometimes you really can put a little hole with a pin in that sticker, let the air out, and then smooth it down. A little “tolerable destruction” can go a long way. And that’s the trick, I think. When you’re in that cycle of problems, look for what aspects of the current situation don’t actually have to survive. What things can you sacrifice for the solution you need?

It’s a trade-off, sure. But a different kind – and sometimes getting rid of something is a solution in itself.

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Something that brings me to tears might roll right off your back. Something that you struggle with might be effortless to me.

“Many hands make light work,” but it’s also about the differences in those hands. Your burden isn’t just lessened because I help carry it – I might also know something you don’t about how to solve it. I have different eyes, different hands, a different heart.

We help each other triumph and we hold each other as we fall. Build your circle that way, and be the first to offer when you can. Yours might be the very hand that’s most needed.

I’ve always been the kind of person who’s comfortable just thinking for extended periods. On a long road trip or flight, I’ve never needed a book or video game or anything like that. In fact, those times were often quite welcome – if you just sit in a room and stare, people often think weird things! But it’s more normal to stare out the window of a moving vehicle, and I liked the excuse.

That isn’t to say that my thoughts are always pleasant. Far from it. But I think it’s a good thing to be comfortable even with the uncomfortable thoughts. They’re in there somewhere, whether you acknowledge them or not. At least in my conscious mind I can keep an eye on them. Maybe even resolve some of them.

You’re never really alone. You’re just with your thoughts. Make sure you’re good company.

Being in pain for a short period of time can sometimes energize you. A sharp shock can send a surge of adrenaline up that can give you great strength or endurance.

But pain for a long time does the opposite. It’s exhausting to be in pain for that long. And hard to rest. It can drain you to the bottom of the barrel.

May you all get a little rest, and a little better.

We give people too much credit sometimes.

Think about the five worst decisions you ever made – the ones that turned out to have the most disastrous consequences in your life. Chances are good that the majority of those decisions weren’t made with a clear head. You made poor decisions because you were exhausted, stressed, drunk, scared, angry, or any number of other things. Of those five decisions, you’d be lucky if one of them was something you could honestly say you’d do again with a clear head and twelve hours to reconsider.

Okay, now think about the last time someone else made a decision that negatively impacted you. The last time someone fired you, or didn’t buy that big sale you were pushing, or broke your heart, or whatever. My guess is that you think they made that decision with a perfectly firm heart and sober head. They calculated the best possible way to hurt you and did it with exactly that intent, right?

Look, people are just bad at… most things, most days. We’re all drunk toddlers waving around swords most of the time. Carrying grudges around because of that will just make you make even worse decisions.

Our whole lives, we have people in authority over us. We grow up with parents, teachers, bosses, all of whom we believe must – by default – be infallible. After all, they couldn’t be in charge of us if there were simply random stimulus-response machines, right? That would be insane! Who would allow that?!

The entire system of barely-functioning stimulus-response machines, that’s who.

At a certain point in your life, I think the point where you truly become an adult, you realize that your parents were just people, trying their best with no clue what they were doing. Your first boss at the ice cream store when you were 15 was probably younger than you are now – heck, they might have been all of 17. The first person who ever fired you might have just gotten divorced that day, but they couldn’t exactly call you up the week after and say that and offer you your job back in most cases. The world makes us double down on our own stupidity, lest we become the scapegoat everyone else is secretly hoping for.

The solution is simple, but not easy. You insulate yourself as best as you can against the failings of others. You rely on yourself for the important things, like wisdom and security. You don’t trust your entire family’s continued survival on whether or not your over-stressed boss holds it together for another day. You don’t place your entire self-image in the hands of a partner who doesn’t know how to change a tire. You don’t believe that your children’s education will be perfectly shepherded by a 22-year-old C student who yes, is absolutely trying their best, but that’s not really the issue.

The point isn’t to be an isolationist. Other people can be wonderful additions to your life. You will sometimes have bosses, hopefully have partners, maybe have children who will maybe have teachers, and all of these things can be amazing. Neighbors and friends and lovers and colleagues and fans and heroes are all part of the rich tapestry of life. But none of those people should hold more sway over your life’s outcomes than you. And that’s largely up to you – people gain that influence over our lives because we give it to them. Because we think there’s benefit to outsourcing that agency.

But on their best day, I doubt it.

Don’t police the little decisions. Police the big ones, and then let the sub-decisions run wild.

Let’s say your department has to stay within a $10,000 budget for the upcoming project. The wrong thing to do is try to approve every individual expenditure. The correct thing to do is give the team a $9,000 account and let them use their discretion. And if you don’t trust your team to use their discretion… well, that’s on you, pal. You either hired them, trained them, or both. Why didn’t you do a better job?

It’s the same with my kids. I don’t believe in policing their every intake of food. It sounds exhausting. Instead, I just only buy things that I’m comfortable with them eating without my supervision. That means that I only buy things that are healthy and not terribly messy. In practice it means a lot of fruits and raw veggies, pre-cooked chicken and other lunchmeats, cheese, and hard-boiled eggs. They can eat as much of that stuff as they want, and I don’t have to spend every five minutes attending to my children’s appetites like a waiter.

If you want less stress in your life, save your decisions for setting the parameters, and set them around the decision space such that any decisions made within that space are satisfactory.