My daughter asked if I could help her make her own miso soup. We had all the ingredients, so away we went.

I don’t actually know the proper way to make miso soup. But I know generally what goes in it and what it tastes like. And more importantly, I know the secret to all soup.

The secret to all soup is this: you boil a pot of water, and then you put whatever you want in there.

It’s all soup! Sometimes it’s not miso, or chicken noodle, or gazpacho, or whatever. But it’s always soup. You can’t set out to make soup and fail. If you boiled water, put something tasty in there, and ate it, then congratulations – soup!

The secret to all soup is also the secret to ninety-nine percent of life. Get the basics down, and then fill in the details however you want. You don’t have to live by other people’s recipes.

If you’re bopping around the kitchen having fun and whatever you made tastes great (and hey – it did!), then you’re winning. Keep it up!

I am terrible with problems that just have to be “managed,” not solved. When I’ve tasked myself with a problem, my mind tends to focus on it pretty obsessively. That’s an advantage when solving a problem, but it’s an awful curse when just maintaining.

Some problems aren’t the kind that have a once-and-for-all solution. Some problems simply have to be monitored. You might have a chronic health condition that can’t be fixed, only mitigated, for example. I don’t do well, there.

I’m adjusting, of course. It helps to break timelines down. To say “Okay, the problem to be solved this week is to get XYZ results before the week is out.” That’s something discrete and tangible that I can address. That can give my mind some relief.

I’ll find more solutions that work. I always do. After all, that’s a problem I can solve, too.

Work is hard enough without someone trying to stop you. And you’d think that wouldn’t be a frequent occurrence, but sometimes the people doing the most to hinder you are the people who ostensibly want the work to get completed as much as you do!

Sometimes people want to get to the same place as you, but they want the journey to be very different. They could just have a big ego. Maybe they want more credit than they’ll get if they just stay out of your way. Or perhaps their intentions are noble but they’re just not very good at the task in question. Whatever the case, it’s always a challenge when you have to do the extra layer of work that is managing someone who doesn’t want to be managed.

Pick your battles. Leave when you can. This sort of fight is rarely worth it, because you don’t even get a vanquished foe when you’re done – you just get an annoyed ally. Take a deep breath and kill ’em with kindness. Offer to follow their lead, and then do your own thing if they lead poorly – they’ll back off more readily than if you argue up front.

And seek out more allies in new places, whenever you can. The more you have to choose from, the less likely you’ll be stuck with the worst one.

None of us are perfect – not in mind, not in body, not in spirit. Weakness and sickness are relative.

If you say something is “wrong” with you, you’re not stating an objective, platonic fact about the universe. You’re making a comparison. For some, that comparison is to the norm for your peers – maybe your condition makes your vision worse or your resistance to disease lower. Or maybe you’re making a comparison to your former self; before this developed, you were faster or stronger or felt less pain.

This isn’t me saying that those comparisons aren’t valid. I’m just trying to gather some context for my own understanding.

So the concept of “better” is just that – you don’t become free of weakness, but maybe you can become “better.” Better than yesterday. Better than the baseline. A little less pain, a little more speed, a few deeper breaths.

Someday, something gets all of us. Some days we’ll get worse. But when we can, we get a little better.

Whenever you want to win against someone, leave them a way out. If you corner someone, they have no choice but to go all-in against you. If you give them a graceful exit, most will take it.

So today, I went to a small local cafe for a business meetup. The waiter asked me what I’d like to drink, and I asked for an iced tea. One of my colleagues was then asking about flavors of tea, and the waiter mentioned that they had peppermint tea, which I like.

“Ooh,” I said. “Could I change my order to a peppermint iced tea, please?”

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “We don’t have peppermint iced tea.”

…

I looked at him for a moment, just in case he was joking. He wasn’t. He seemed genuinely ignorant of the relationship between tea and iced tea. I didn’t want to burden him, so instead I asked if I could just have a hot peppermint tea and a glass of ice, then.

He asked: “So, you want that AND the iced tea?”

…

I clarified that I just wanted the hot peppermint tea and a glass of ice, thank you.

A few moments later, he returned. What he brought with him to serve to me was the following, and ONLY the following:

– A glass of (normal, non-peppermint) iced tea, with a lemon slice, and
– A sealed peppermint tea bag.

And when he set these two items down in front of me, he said:

“I hope this is what you wanted.”

People describe me as very optimistic. I don’t really like that term, because I don’t really like the whole “optimism/pessimism” axis of thought. Both of those mindsets yield a lot of agency to the universe, and that’s not the way I like to operate. I seem optimistic because I think things will work out well, but I don’t think that because I’m trusting in good fortune. I think things will work out generally well because that’s the way I’ve engineered them to work out.

Sure, some things are out of my control. Lots of things, in fact! But I don’t waste any time even thinking about whether those things will work out well or poorly. Instead, I think about ranges of outcomes, and my potential reactions.

An optimist thinks a coin flip will end up in his favor. A pessimist thinks it won’t. I don’t think either of those things – instead, I think about the bets I can make, what I stand to gain or lose, and whether I can choose to bet or not. I make my bets accordingly and then I’m satisfied that no matter how the coin lands, I’ll be fine. I’m not sure what kind of ‘ist’ that is, but that’s the kind I am.

You are not a passive observer of your own life. Roll your sleeves up and start working – minimize your need for hope or your vulnerability to fear. Be an empowerist.

Count backward from ten. Breathe. Keep your mouth shut. Listen, but listen to the patterns of information more than the information itself – most of which is nonsense.

The fire will burn out, the dust will settle, and there will be time to sift through the ashes. You’ll find truth in a book a decade or a century later, not in a screaming crowd while the flames still rage.

Just a reminder that humanity is most tested when it’s most needed.

“We can’t help what we like.”

Sure we can.

Deciding to like or not like something is way easier than trying to force yourself to act opposite of your desires. When I was a teenager and living on my own, money was extremely tight. I needed to make cost-efficient choices when it came to necessities like food. Until that point in my life, I hated peanut butter. But it’s cheap, calorically dense, fairly nutritious, and doesn’t require any particular kind of storage – perfect for a kid living in shaky circumstances. The only problem was that I couldn’t stand the stuff.

But it was the right choice, so I decided to like it. Not “I decided to eat it even though I didn’t like it,” because that sounded like torture. I just decided to like it.

Now I love the stuff. People hear that story and think I’m weird, but I think most people just haven’t tried reprogramming their desires. All it ever took for me was thinking about the act or object, skipping the middle part where I thought about how it felt, and then thinking hard about the other side – how it felt when it was over.

So for peanut butter, I’d look at the jar, and not think about the taste – which is fleeting and inconsequential anyway – and instead think about the end result, and how much I like having a cheap, easy, portable, nutritious way to feed myself. Boom, I like this stuff! I could think about that even while shoveling spoonfuls into my craw, and the deed was done. My brain was now wired to like the stuff. How it tasted was just a manifestation of that.

It’s the same with soda. Soda is absolutely terrible. It’s pure poison, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. All I had to do was think about how vile it was, and it suddenly made me sick to my stomach instead of tasting good.

The point is, it’s not a question of willpower, or of forcing yourself to do stuff. It’s just a question of deciding why you like things in the first place. You’re not an animal, led around entirely by your short-term sensory input. You can take the little wire in your brain that connects “what you like” to “why you like it,” and unplug the “why you like it” end from your sensory organs and plug it into your reason instead.

Give it a try. It might not be as hard as you think.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with creating for yourself. If you make music or art or anything like that, you can – and should! – make what makes you happy. Make music you want to listen to. Make art you want to look at. Write what you want to read.

But fundamentally, that’s a different skill set than being able to do those things professionally.

See, doing anything professionally is pretty much defined as “trading a thing I can do to other people for stuff they have that I want,” i.e. usually money. You can’t always have it both ways. Sure, you can create things that appeal to you and then look for the incredibly narrow audience of people whose tastes align exactly with your own, but that mentality is why there are a lot of “starving artists.”

Selling to other people isn’t selling out. If you’re a brilliant musician and you really like jazz, but someone is willing to pay you to produce a country album, then produce the country album! The money you make lets you pursue other passions and do what you like. Artistic integrity is a real thing, but it’s diminished by doing harmful things, not by doing perfectly fine things that just don’t align with your own preferred tastes.

Helping others is a wonderful virtue, and doing so with creative gifts that give you more freedom to play in that playground is a huge win/win. Don’t avoid it.